a museum of all the things that make him up

A Keflin of a Different Color


# A Keflin of a Different Color

Welcome to Gnarflax. Do you have your boarding pass? Is your implant loaded with enough units? Might we take you to the cabaret, where beautiful Lupkins will remove their Lupcovers and show you their Lupudders? One swipe of the fore-appendage, and your units will transfer you wherever you want to go.

Do you have the proper documentation to be in a place like this? We must scan your makeup bag to ensure you have brought nothing with which to harm the Lupkins. The Lupkins have their own built-in defense systems, of course, but the release of such neurotoxin in such a small room will destroy all of the other patrons as well as the staff of Naflecks who are simply here to serve and protect your methaholic beverages.

Well, how about that? Your genetic makeup bag has passed inspection, you may reingest it.

Enjoyed your share of Lupudders? Aren't they wondrous, the way they spray nourishment in fountainous rhythm as she vibrates against your thorax and caresses your carapace? Come into the back room, then, we have a proposition for you.

My partners and I have been watching you, and we've decided you must be a Keflin of a different color. Don't worry, this is not an exploitation like you've seen in the newsflesh webwork. The truth is, we've come across transmissions, strange ones from a distant green and blue lump long eaten by its own lightball.

There is the culture of an odd race of aliens in these data, and strange words they use to describe things. Concepts we scoff at, like “vanity,” and “honor.” If you are beautiful we display you, and if you are brave we put you to war. Questions abound in this strange stream of consciousness, such as “What is free will?” and “Why are we here?” Useless questions with obvious answers.

We'd like to loan you a box that will play these transmissions, a small cube that emits radiation. When you look into it you will discover that these beings are interminably ugly, and it may become necessary for you to evacuate the contents of your feed sack.

But we see lots of potential in this new world, the currently dead world across the galaxy. So if you can steel yourself against the disgusting creatures and their strange way of undulating in disposable skins to distasteful noise patterns, we'd appreciate it to the tune of twenty-thousand units every twelfth of a lightball rotation if you could make notes and discover just what sort of adjustments might be made to our cabarets and methaholes that these 'humans' have suggested. They are primitive, but we think they might have some ideas. Even more than that, in the future we believe that it's possible for us to grow to love these ugly beings. They might become something of a sensation among the undergrounders, Keflins and Hujmuggers and Naflecks and Riskawens and Lupkins and Buarns alike.

We will only require your notes every so often, and you may feel free to distribute them to us whenever you come to Gnarflex to collect your units. Do you agree? Yes? Wonderful. We would do it ourselves, but our feed sacks are sore from all the evacuations. Nothing can be uglier than these things, we have come to conclude. Will your pincers and fore-appendages be enough to carry the radiation cube back with you to your ship? Yes? Wonderful. Don't lose the box. Tonight, if you can stand it, there will be a production of a sort of myth, a story these creatures take very seriously. It is about a human who accumulates disciples along the path to a great city where a king holds this human's fate in his hands.

It is called “The Wizard of Oz.” The disciples, one made of metal and one made of grass, are infinitely less ugly than the human with the head tentacles. Perhaps it would be a good story to get started on. Prepare your notes. Remember, twenty thousand units.

Go, now. Tap a Lupkin on the way out, so she can absorb a cred or two. They can't help that their genetic makeup bags fit them only for one occupation.

Neither can you.


An Evening of Blue

Balloons

Bertrand Bone: Nose Masseuse


# Bertrand Bone, Nose Masseuse

Among relaxation connoisseurs bored with acupuncture, a good nose masseuse is a delicacy. But until recently, nobody knew about the field. If you wanted to succeed in nose masseusery your marketing had to be superb.

Bertrand happened to be both a nose masseuse and skilled at marketing.

He’d gotten his start at sleep-away camp his tenth grade summer, when one cold night his bunkmate Warwick woke up screaming, sinus golf ball behind his eyes and no way to force any air through his nostrils, in or out.

Bertrand sprang from his bunk and raced to the boy, flinging him out of bed. Then he applied the base of his palm to the ridge between and below the eyes.

Then he broke the boy’s nose.

Warwick began thanking him, through the babbling blood from his busted vessels.

“I’m at peace, for a moment at least, Bertrand. You’re an angel.”

In the morning, the boy still had to go home and there were whispers of brain damage, but the event heartened Bertrand. He’d acted spontaneously, decisively, and produced a favorable outcome. He was a healer. If he was lucky he’d find a university eager to develop his gift.

That university turned out to be Orel Roberts' School of Dentistry and Chiropractory, after the applications to Tufts and Columbia--two of the foremost in the healing arts--left his applications unreturned, neither bothering to pay postage for the small white envelopes bearing the single-sheet form rejection slip that seven other universities had sent.

Bertrand wondered if his entrance essay had been too confident, or if his grade point average (2.7) was a point of contention for the admittance person. He wondered until the bright yellow packet from Orel Roberts came, and when he tore it open, thumb separating the fused flap from the rest, the first line of the most conspicuous folded-up piece of paper did not say “We'd like to thank you for your interest in our university, however...” — he started to dance.

He was in.

At college, Bertrand grew bored of his classes and took to sleeping late, playing video games and drinking until he passed out. Sometimes he went to class, and he always went to exams, but the real learning that first year took place in his dorm room.

Nights he wasn’t drunk he still dreamed of becoming a nose masseuse. He’d practiced his skills on his roommate, on the groups of students who came over to smoke pot out of his roommate's hookah (wasteful but for the novelty of it).

“I'm not saying breaking noses is necessarily necessary--outside of extreme cases,” he'd say to them. “Not that I wouldn't break any of yours in an instant if you were suffering from the sort of discomfort my friend Warwick was.”

He'd chuckle then, putting the boys and girls at ease. But by the end of the night he'd have given them all sinus realignments, and would be telling them what to notice in their breathing from now on.

“In the cold, you'll have no trouble. Won’t feel like it's freezing in your nostrils. And I dare any of you to come back and tell me you sneezed, because you won't be able too, because you'll be lying.”

They'd all been genuinely impressed.

The next week one of the kids texted him with a problem. A boy named Kevin was unable to get his nose to stop running. Bertrand got him to come over then put him in ankle shackles, hanging him upside down from the loft bed he slept in.

“What I’m going to do now,” Bertrand said, “is use suction to clear the fluid from your sinuses, and then I’m going to do a realignment so that you aren’t creating new mucus for twenty-four hours.”

Kevin, hanging upside down, writhed an okay.

Bertrand turned on his vacuum and held the attachment wand in his right hand. On the end, half of an enema bulb stretched over the tube’s opening. He alternated between nostrils, advising Kevin not to try to breathe through his nose until he said.

He began sucking the boy’s snot.

“This is unpleasant, no?”

Kevin squirmed in reply. Bertrand continued to explore with the enema tip, sucking more and more mucus out of the boy's nostrils.

“This vacuum is pretty loud, but maybe it’d be nice to turn some music on.”

Bertrand paused what he was doing and rolled back to his computer screen, on which he loaded the Smashing Pumpkins.

“Okay! I think we’ve got enough mucus. Now we’re going to do a realignment.”

Without warning, he wound up and kicked Kevin with a specific amount of force, right between the eyes.

The boy screamed, and his flailing arms protracted in order for him to clutch his face. Bertrand let him hang there, crying and dangling until he looked up, an expression of betrayal there.

“Now I will let you down and you’ll be able to breathe.”

He undid Kevin’s left foot strap. “Now make sure you can hold yourself up before I release the next one.” He undid the other strap and Kevin tipped forward into the room, landing in a crouch on his knees.

“It...you...it worked!”

“Yes. The methods of a nose masseuse are secret and practiced by few; of the ones who know the methods, fewer choose to practice. Thank you for letting me practice on you, Kevin. I’m glad I could help you.”

“What do I owe you?”

“Nothing. Tell your friends. Parts of it may not be pleasant, like the kick in the face, but think of acupuncture—it’s a lot of it the same principle. Not nice to think about, and not nice while it’s happening, but it does the trick.”

“What was your name again? Bertram?”

“Bertrand Bone. Nose masseuse.” He dug out of his desk a business card, one he’d gotten made up by an art student. He'd designed the card as a nose with pull tabs under each nostril. One pull tab had his name and what he was, and the other had his phone number and email address. Pull tabs looked like snot. The art kid promised him it would be good marketing, which was all Bertrand needed to hear.

“Take this, and call me in the morning.” Kevin said, enjoying himself now with his malady tended to.

“Yes, if you need to, although you won’t need to. If you call I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”

“Uh..okay. Thanks. Weird card too, do you have more?”

“Sure, take two.” Bertrand gave him a stack.

“Funny, Bert. Later,” Kevin said, and left.

Bertrand did fist pumps alone in his room, the verse of a Smashing Pumpkins song guiding him along:

    _Try, ease the pain
    Somehow we'll feel the same
    Well, no one knows
    Where our secrets go_

Bertrand did not graduate from Orel Roberts. He dropped out with one of the worst grade point averages the school had ever had.

He didn’t care. He had a network of students who came to him frequently, and a network of their parents, and a network of their parents’ bosses. All he needed now was to take this from a dorm room operation and turn it into an office operation. He needed a license.

Getting a massage license was not hard--it helped that Orel Roberts sent him a letter telling him he met the requirements for an associate degree, but he left out that his form of masseusery wasn't as tame as the other.

His offered no happy endings, but a kick in the face wasn't out of the question.

He called his parlor the Olfactory Tune-Up, and that way he got people primed about smells and music to hide it's status as an alternative medicine office funded with venture capital from all the rich bosses who paid him privately for massages. They thought he was magic, a wunderkind. In return, Bertrand started to believe them.

Years later, one of the men he routinely saw, and who he was testing a new procedure on, one that centered around the barest tickling of the frontal lobe with temporarily dislodged cartilage, got famous becoming a conspiracy news anchor, and began doing unpaid commercials for the services Bertrand provided.

He got calls from doctors, lawyers. He got calls from people so powerful that later on, in a state of brain-stimulated nirvana, they confessed to him that they saw themselves as in control of the world and the events that took place in it. Bertrand’s list of VIP clientele grew, and he had to shut down his regular practice. The locals in his town cheered; they now often picketed and made threats to the Olfactory Tune-Up for peddling false medicine, what was to them unproven science.

The real reason he closed was that secretly he was performing a service that had so captivated the elite class that he had almost effortlessly become the most important person in the world.

The first time he’d had the thought he’d scolded himself: _Think about how the dorsal cartilage might be co-opted to create a sense of euphoria rivaling that of an epiphany, not about enhancing your own ego_.

“It’s not about my ego,” he said out loud to himself. Saying it made him feel good and enhanced his idea of himself and how good he was.

Some hoodlums came in one time, convinced his shop was a front for a criminal outfit, but he was able to convince them he was a nose masseuse, whatever that was, and he ended up with clients who worked for a would-be rival criminal outfit.

One of these men ended up doing private security for the president elect and Bertrand had the fortune of being the nose masseuse for this man as well.

They got on well, him and the President.

One morning the Press Secretary found the President dead in the Oval Office, slumped over his desk, bleeding from the eyes.

An official cause of death was still forthcoming, but there were initial reports of plenty of maxillofacial injuries consistent with kicks to the face.

The House of Representatives called Bertrand before a grand jury.

“These kicks to his face were not from me,” he explained.

“You see, we got on well, me and The President. Once he had a taste of my nose masseusery, he started scheduling appointments so often I considered moving to Washington DC. When I wasn’t around it seems the president…moved on, to a more unqualified practitioner.”

The evidence would bear him out—he hadn’t moved to Washington, and the perpetrator of the final kicks to POTUS’s face was the Chief of Staff, then on trial for murder, then convicted, then pardoned by the incoming President as an act of good faith.

With the attention he got from tangential involvement in the death of a president, stations invited Bertrand on television, to sit in a chair in this studio or that, and Bertrand liked the chairs he sat in, and they kept asking him back. If he had a television he thought he'd enjoy watching his appearances, but it never felt important to him to buy one.

He made good money with private clients, but the most fun and what he thought worked the best for spreading the word about his practice and the benefits of a properly-trained masseuse, were the colleges and concert halls, where he’d perform live on willing participants with ailments.

Sometimes these were simulcast around the world, but Bertrand didn’t know much about that. He knew he was doing what was working for him, and if it worked for other people elsewhere, that was gravy.

Who was he to deny the world his talents?


Brian's Elephant

Cannibal

Clayton's Secret Notebook


# Clayton's Secret Notebook

There’s a story I want to tell you about a man I knew once.

Something happened to him, and his name was Clayton. Never mind who I am for a minute, this is about him. You know those stories people tell at parties? Fancy parties, where all the guests are wearing ties? The story, it’s always practiced. Embellished. Repeated. Every party the same story. The same guy, the same little group of people gathered around thinking they’re hearing something new, that somehow they’re special.

This story is like that. Except I’m only going to tell it once, and it’s true.

It goes like this: Clayton got married to a nice girl. A beautiful girl. Blonde, tall, great smile. I was there, I danced at the reception with some brunette. If women were silverware my date would have been a real spoon. I gave a mediocre toast. For a present I got them a mixer, one of those big bowls with the spinning claw up top. I think it doubled as a bread maker, maybe. They’ll never use it.

On their honeymoon they go somewhere different. The Bahamas, Hawaii, Paris? Nope. The fucking Grand Canyon.

They fly. Southwest from Detroit, get off in Phoenix. Rent a car. Drive out to some tourist hotel by the South Rim of the Canyon. I know which hotel, but I’m going to stop for a second to explain something important.

I know what happened out there, even though I’ve never been to Arizona. Never been west of the Mississippi, and only ever drove through Canada. So everything I know about the Grand Canyon is stuff I’ve seen on TV or read in books. Maybe Arizona is all desert, I don’t know. I don’t know a whole lot, and the little I do know I didn’t learn until a long time after the accident. After the funeral, I tried to get Clayton on the phone, to talk to him about it. I sent him e-mails, letters. I did what I could do, but he didn’t want anything to do with me. I gave up. I had done my grieving, and I tried to move on with my life and figured he was doing the same. All of us knew there was no one to blame.

One day I get a phone call, and it’s not from him, it’s from his mother. He’s gone missing. A strange development, but not altogether surprising or particularly distressing. I tell her he probably just went off to think. She tells me she’s had the police looking for him for three days. It's the second call I get from her that winter—the first one was about Imogene. Clayton's mother got the news before my parents.

When I get off the phone I go and sit on my porch. It’s February, and we’re having sort of a warm spell. All the icicles on my gutter are dripping and I’m thinking about the time Clayton and I drove to Mount Pleasant to play in a poker tournament. I went out the first round and Clayton sat there with this grin on his face, knowing I couldn’t stand seeing him win because it meant I had nothing to do but order drinks until his chips were gone. We were twenty-three. On the way home at five in the morning he drove right over a deer carcass, and the stink came up through the air conditioner and stuck on us, stinging our eyes as we retched out open windows.

You know how when you watch TV sometimes and you’re talking to the guy next to you, or your wife or girlfriend, and all of a sudden someone on the TV says the exact same thing you or she just said? Or when you’re driving down the road and you start humming a song and then you put the radio on and that same song is playing? Sort of weirds you out? That’s how I feel when the UPS truck pulls up and a big thick woman with a man’s haircut gets out and hands me a package. I sign for it, noticing that it says on the slip that it’s from Clayton. Only I feel it twice as bad, because not only had I just been thinking about him, I just got off the phone with his mom. I don’t notice the big lady get in her truck or drive away, but she must, because the next time I look up the street is empty.

I put it in the chair next to me and don’t open it. After a few minutes it’s almost as if he’s there, sitting with me. That’s nice, except I also feel like he’s trying to tell me something and I’m making him wait just so I can pretend things are like they used to be. Not that I don’t want to know what’s in it, just that I’m scared whatever it is will mean he’s gone for good.

It’s a big red notebook. Spiral-bound with leather covers. Filled with eighty or ninety loose-leaf sheets of yellow notebook paper, like what comes off a legal pad. Maybe by then I’m starting to get cold. In February, even when it’s warm it’s not warm. I should go inside, I remember thinking, but I don’t. I sit there on my porch and read this notebook straight through, cover to cover. The first page I’ll never forget. Scrawled in red ink across the first two lines are the words, “Secret Notebook.” Under that, written even bigger, “The Truth.”

I’m telling you this for two reasons. One is, I believe what I read in the notebook. It made some sense, but for the most part it didn’t. That’s how I knew it was true. Two is, I’m the only one who’s ever read it, and after I did I burned it. Maybe that wasn’t the best idea, but I wasn’t thinking right. If I hadn’t, this story wouldn’t need a middleman. I’d just have you read the notebook. Everything I couldn’t have known, all of the details I’d never imagine, all of them come from the notebook. I thought you should know.

Enough of that. This story is about Clayton, and his wife. Her name, you might have guessed, was Imogene. When they were alone, he called her his Imogenery Friend. I always called her Genie.

When they arrived, they drove to a tourist resort called The Grand Hotel, the same name as that hotel up on Mackinac Island where they shot that Christopher Reeve time travel movie back in the eighties. The Grand Hotel is part of a mini-mall called “Grand Canyon Village” on Highway 64, just two miles from where the action is. It’s where they’d spent two nights together, and while they had reservations for three…well, things happen. This particular thing, in this particular place, happens on average two or three times a year. Usually it’s a kid whose parents are looking away for a moment to tie a shoe or take a drink.

Clayton didn’t see her fall.

Those first two nights were magic. The happiest my friend had been his whole life. Sure, it sounds like hyperbole. But when you’re twenty-six and feel like you’ve found and secured the love of your life, and hey, you get to see and touch her without clothes on too? Give me something that beats that and I’ll shut up right now. If I know Genie, she was plenty happy too, but I didn't get to hear it from her.

I don’t want to leave anything out, but it’s going to happen. Clayton wrote about the fireplace in the lobby, the obligatory Western-themed restaurant and adjacent saloon with a new band every night. Mostly he wrote about the bedroom, the dimples on either side of her spine just above her buttocks. The taste of her sweat and the way she clung to him like a monkey to its mother. The way she whispered his name and how her tongue slid into his ear when he was inside her. That the dirtiest thing she could think of to say was “Give me your baby,” and how that one remark had made him laugh to the point of jeopardizing their lovemaking altogether.

When she napped he sat in a chair by the window and watched her, the corners of his mouth upturned in the slightest way, thinking he’d never be this happy again and not knowing he was right.

The first night they walked to the movie theater a block away and saw Forrest Gump. Imogene got through it fine but Clayton cried at the end when Forrest visits the tree where Jenny’s buried. He was torn between trying to hide it and being proud of being moved by a film, so he only dried the eye closest to his wife. When it finished he found she’d been watching him the whole time with a look of feigned concern.

The next day they got up early and went out on the trail with a group of tourists. They rubbed suntan lotion on each other and traded water bottles, because Clayton said it would be easier to remind her to drink than it would be for him to remember to do it for himself. She had a camera, one of those Nikons with big screw-on lenses from work (she was a Free Press photographer) and she wore out two whole rolls of film on the Canyon before sunset. She took plenty of Clayton too, but he never knew it. Imogene didn't want him to pretend happiness for a photograph - the pictures she took showed the real thing.

The next morning they took the Rim Trail by themselves, which was considered one of the more scenic and less dangerous of routes. Funny how things don't work like they're supposed to.

He was looking through the viewfinder. The sun was behind some clouds and then it came out, and he couldn't see her anymore – she had been replaced with a box full of glare. He had his other eye closed, and instead of pulling the thing off his face and resetting for the sun, he squeezed the shutter button.

“There.”

He let the camera drop around his neck and squinted at her. “Why don't I take another – Imogene?” He was squinting at an empty rock face. Mather Point, one of the most popular views of the canyon. This is where she wanted her photograph taken. He turned around. She'd doubled back so she could come up from behind and scare him, or she was hiding somewhere. But there was nowhere to hide. No Imogene doubling back anywhere. A knot started to tighten in his guts.

“Imogene?”

He inched forward. He wasn't sure why, she wasn't down there. No way she could have fallen - she hadn't made a noise. If she'd fallen she would have screamed, he would have heard it. He would have seen her. So why did he keep stepping forward, six inches at a time? And then, when he got to the edge, why couldn't he force himself to look down? Why was Clayton crying already?

He didn't remember spotting her, didn't remember vomiting, calling the police, or climbing down the four hundred feet himself. When they asked him later to describe the sequence of events he told them he had walked to the edge of the cliff and then he was beside her, with two broken ankles and blood all over him. They told him she'd been dead when he got there, that she'd died on impact, but that wasn't what he remembered.

Imogene smiled at him, and her good eye moved to meet his. The other side of her skull was caved in, and her neck was turned back like a broken pencil.

“I tried to joke,” she said to him, her words somehow clear. “I wanted to trick you into thinking I fell.”

“I know,” he said, “Don't talk,” he said, and “I love you.”

“I ruined all your plans.”

“Don't worry, beautiful. We'll just go home. We'll just go back and it'll all be just how it was. We don't have to have a honeymoon, okay? I don't need one.”

“Look at me,” she said, and he did. It hit him. He wanted to hit it back.

“No.”

Then there was a helicopter, and he was alone. Imogene wasn't smiling at him – she was dead.

The hospital staff left him alone, and he didn't talk to anyone. For two days he lay in bed, forcing himself to sleep, just so she could be alive again. It didn't matter that when he woke up he got so angry he tried to tear the casts off his legs. It was worth it, and he deserved the pain. His fault. His fault his fault his fault.

He flew back to Michigan with Imogene's body. At the funeral he sat and said nothing. He didn't cry. When I tried to catch his eye he looked away. My parents went over to talk to him and he turned his wheelchair around and rolled himself to his parents' car. He couldn't give anyone what they wanted, couldn't be an object of pity. Feeling was a luxury he didn't allow himself, unless that feeling was anger. His mother and father tried to get him to come back to live in the house of his childhood, but he swore at them. They dropped him off at his old apartment. It was stale and smelled like corn syrup. He thought he should start drinking, but didn't, because he didn't think it would matter.

The doorbell rang, the phone rang, and he didn't answer either. He didn't read or watch TV, and swore off personal hygiene altogether. He slept as much as he could and ate as little as possible, and in the few hours he was awake he wrote in a notebook all the things he should have said to her as she died. Then he made a list of the ways he could have saved her, and finally he wrote down all the most painful ways he could kill himself. That was what he wanted most. He even tried once, had one arm down the kitchen In-Sink-Erator to the elbow and the other on the switch, all ready to do it, when the phone rang. He didn't move to get it, but didn't want to bleed out without knowing what the message was going to be, so he waited.

It was the photo place. His mother had dropped off the camera and the rolls of film for him the other day, and the pictures had been developed. Would he like to come down and get them or should she call his mother and have her bring them to him?

He was curious. He called back, and for the first time in almost a month, made ready to leave the apartment. He showered and shaved, and when the photo lady handed him the stack of envelopes with a smile, he almost smiled back.

At home he spread them all on his bed, and spent a minute with each, poring over its details. He even smelled them, imagining he was with a part of her again, a part she'd made just for him, just for this moment. But the feeling soon passed. They were pictures. Just pictures of the Grand Canyon, like anyone else's. She wasn't in any of them.

That was almost true.

It was the very last picture in the bottom envelope, the one he'd taken even though he hadn't seen anything.

On her face was a look of exaggerated terror. Her left foot was raised and stepping back, and her arms were treading air as she pre-tended to struggle with her balance. Clayton stared at the photo for near an hour, fresh waves of despair wracking him. It was like falling in love again, and it was like being shot in the chest. He glued the other pictures to the ceiling above his bed and the picture of Imogene into the back of a red leather notebook. On the first page of the notebook he wrote, “Secret Notebook,” and under that, in bigger letters, “The Truth.”

“The truth is,” he wrote on the first page, “Some things we aren't meant to come back from,” and, on the last, “Mark, you deserved to know. I'm sorry. Tell my mom I'm okay.”

The day after I burn the notebook I call his mother back.

“What's the news?”

“They want to call it off.”

I close my eyes. When I open them, I'm looking at the picture of Imogene between my fingers. The only thing I saved, because I couldn't burn her.

On the phone, I say,“They'll find him. You'll see. Just wait, I'm sure he's fine,” but the words are hollow.

I'm holding the last picture anyone's ever taken of Genie, my little sister, in the last moment of her life before she plummets into the Grand Canyon. I can't look away.

On the phone, I say, “You'll see,” and “Just wait.”

Just wait.


Cockroach A


# Cockroach A

Raymond winced with each floor creak.

_“Sorry, sorry,”_ he whispered to himself, hoping the woman in the other room was awake. If she was, she wouldn’t come alive with fright, her default reaction in their encounters. “Oh! you scared me,” when he returned from hours blundering around the city, or “Oh! I didn’t know you were here,” when he hadn’t left the apartment for days.

Raymond was no frightening figure. His tucked shoulders and averted eyes made him easy to ignore in public and private.

As the boards beneath him creaked, Raymond reminded himself he wasn’t an intruder. The small steps he took only seemed to lengthen, louden the creaks. What if he stubbed a toe on a piece of furniture? _I wish I could stay in my room,_ he thought.

But his gut, that bottomless pit!

Finally he came to the kitchen. With his right hand he felt for the light switch, touching instead a power socket. He climbed around with fingers until he found the switch, and flipped it up.

The light came on.

Two shiny black beads rested on the throw rug in front of the refrigerator. Each an inch-and-a-half long, positioned at perpendicular angles.

One of the beads ran at him, antennae waving boldly, stopping in the center of a white square of chess-checkered linoleum, three feet away.

Raymond stepped back. He was used to ants in the apartment, so small he could squint and blur them out of existence. A sandwich tasted as good squinting. But could he squint away a cockroach? Two cockroaches? More?

The other bead hadn’t moved from its position in front of the refrigerator. It seemed Raymond had discovered some plot, interrupted a mission. That roach--C, he thought of it, was the brains, and this one that had run at him, B—the muscle.

“You tell him to back off, all right?” he whispered to the brains. “Tell him I’m not going for the fridge anymore. I’m going back to bed. I’ll forget I saw you.”

Neither insect moved. Raymond was struck by a flash of anger. He was thousands of times their size. They should be afraid of _him!_

He stepped toward the forward bug, expecting it to dart away, under the fridge or into some dark corner.

It didn’t flee. It didn't move.

He took two more loud steps forward. Still nothing.

Raymond stood inches from its body, in bare feet. A ripple of grotesque fear drove him back again as the cockroach lunged, swinging its beetle biceps at him.

A standoff.

What could they do to him? Bite? He thought of his current set of bug bites. Bites on his left bicep, his back above his right buttock, his left wrist, his right calf. Each oozed bloodily when scratched. He thought they were mosquito or spider bites, but that's what he always thought. Now, with B and C staring him in the face, he wasn’t sure.

If these two were his biters, they knew where he slept.

_No more sleeping naked,_ he thought. _Long-johns from now on._ He had a vision of B crawling up the inside of his pantleg. What would he do, in bed with a cockroach in his pajamas? No brushing it away or flicking it aside—he imagined beating at the cotton, trying to crunch the roach to death against his skin.

The cockroaches hadn’t moved.

There was a phone book on top of the fridge, but he’d only be able to drop it on one of them. And the noise it would make! No, he wouldn't. He also didn’t want to turn and creak back to his room. Not in the dark. Not if he could imagine them following.

Raymond decided to try again to get on C's good side. Certainly they could come to a reasonable understanding. Raymond didn't want trouble.

“Listen,” he whispered. “Maybe I taste good. I don’t know. But I know someone who tastes even better. She lives across the hall from me. Always leaves her door open. Sleeps on the floor.” Raymond thought it was true. “If you’ll just…get your friend to back up, I’ll take you there.”

Cockroach C by the refrigerator rushed him, and Raymond froze, unable to move. He'd done it wrong. Cockroaches didn’t understand english. Or he’d said something out of place. Maybe it wasn’t proper among cockroaches to trade one’s freedom for another’s.

Instead of attacking, Cockroach C stopped and waved her antennae. B took note, and started backing up. One step at a time, still facing Raymond.

Had they struck a deal? Raymond wanted to believe the had. He turned the kitchen light off and led the way.

When they came to the bathroom, he crouched and pointed into Maryanne’s room. The door was open a crack.

“In there.”

The two bugs raced each other into the darkness. He could no longer tell which of the black beads was which.

Now he hoped his roommate was asleep.

Raymond went back to the kitchen, made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and ducked into his room.

He closed the door and pushed a towel under it, hoping the roaches would forgive his paranoia. In bed he ate his sandwich, wearing a t-shirt and a pair of boxer briefs. A happy medium.

The air conditioner thrummed, and when it started raining, the drops beat a rhythm on the trees.


Eleven Minutes


# Eleven Minutes

The man who sat down across from Eddie Carter with eleven minutes to go was very obviously not his girlfriend.

“Anna’s gonna be running a little late, Eddo,” he said, straightening his coat. “She had some trouble picking out the right shoes and all the taxis were filled up. She’d call you, but she left her phone back in the room and she’s pretty sure that if she goes back to get it, she’ll miss all the empty taxis and by the time she gets back they’ll be full again.” He looked around, nodding. “This is a nice restaurant. Very forties art deco.”

Eddie narrowed his eyes. “Did she send you ahead to tell me?”

“No, I just know. Sort of my thing, knowing things, you know? Like how I know you’re Edward James Carter, and you were born in Murraysville, Pennsylvania, and growing up you had a best friend named Pete who fell off a grain tower and died while you watched, and how you didn’t start hitting puberty till you were fourteen and you had this secret irrational fear that you were turning into a girl.”

Eddie’s face went pale.

“Listen, man. Mister. Whatever. I don’t know who you are, or what you’re about, but I don’t like being blackmailed. It’s never happened to me before, but if that’s what you’re doing, I don’t like it.”

The stranger spread his hands affably in front of him.

“No, not at all! You’ve got it wrong. I like you. I’m just telling you these things so that when I tell you the world is going to end in ten minutes you’ll believe me.”

“The world is going to end.”

“Yeah, this one at least.” He looked at his wrist. There was no watch there. “Well, nine minutes now.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You’re going to propose tonight. You’re touching the engagement ring you got her. In your pocket. From Zales.”

The incredulous smile dropped off Eddie’s face. Of course he was. The most beautiful diamond ring he’d been able to find. All for her. And for a minute all he did was stare at the stranger. The man looked normal enough, slight facial hair covering high cheekbones and eyes that had seen a lot. He thought, I still don't believe you, but what he said was different.

“How does it end? Nuclear?”

“Nah, it ends like no way you’ve ever been told it would. Like a magic trick. There you see it, there you don’t. Only, you don’t actually get to see it after it's gone, because you go with it. I'll see it, but there’s only one of me.”

“You’re going to watch the world end.”

“Done it before. Hundreds of times. A world a day, sometimes. Today it’s yours. Nice enough, when you look around. It would be a nice one to go out in.” He leaned in, giving Eddie a believe-you-me kind of look, “There were some others, Eddo, that were begging to be put down. Horrible places.”

“Uh huh. So, you’re telling me this because I can do something about it?”

“No, no. See, I’m like the foreman on a demolition job. I come in and see that everything is in order, everything’s set to go. All paperwork, really.”

“Oh, right. So why tell anyone? I mean, if nothing can be done -”

“Well, I can’t save the place, but I can do something for someone.”

The words hung in the air, and someone near them started tapping a glass as they offered up a toast.

“You want to save me.”

The stranger edged in closer. From here, Eddie saw the toll time had taken on him. This man was deceptively old.

“Listen, I can tell you still don’t really believe me. And that’s all right. It’s important for you to keep the hope, otherwise you’d be a miserable puddle of despair right now, and neither of us wants that. What I’m trying to do here is offer you a chance to stay alive. You would replace me, do what I do. You don’t have to go down with the ship, and heck, you can stay around as long as you like. See a whole lot of interesting things, and I can finally get some rest.”

“How much time is left now?”

“Six minutes.”

“And until Anna gets here?”

“Three minutes.”

“Is there any way you can, I don’t know, show me?”

The man sighed and looked around the restaurant. “If that’s really how you want to play this, I can do that. But I’m only going to show you a taste, because I don’t want you to go into a seizure and make all these nice people choke on their food. You still want it?”

Eddie nodded and licked his lips. He was nervous, and a moment later when the man reached across the table and put a palm to his temple, he was nothing.

Light and dark, up and down, negative and positive, infinitesimal and infinite, none of those comparisons meant anything anymore. Eddie saw through someone else’s eyes a place that wasn't a place at all, but rather, the absence of one. It hurt to look at, but at the same time it was the most wonderful thing. Unimaginable. The closest sensation he could compare it to was staring up into the sky from the bottom of a pool, and even that was way off. A split-second might have gone by, or a hundred thousand years. Time didn’t exist when nothing could experience its passing.

And then Eddie was back in the restaurant, and there were only five minutes to go.

“Holy God.” He’d been convinced.

The man across from him gave him a knowing nod. “That was be-tween the last world and here. But it’s like that every time. I’m going to need an answer, Eddo.”

Eddie closed his eyes and thought. The world was ending and here he was being offered an escape hatch. How many people would ever get this chance? He could be a true world traveler, see things the man in front of him hadn't even dreamed of...but he’d have to watch each of them wink out of existence, and he’d have to do it alone. It was a sad thought, and for the first time Eddie looked at the stranger with veiled pity. Then there was Anna. If he left, she would die alone, wondering where he’d gone, with no one but a stranger to greet her as it all fell away. He didn’t think he could let that happen. In the end, Eddie only asked one question.

“How many other people before me have you asked to take it on? Your job?”

The stranger closed his eyes and smiled, as if he’d been expecting the question. “Tens, hundreds. I haven’t kept count.”

Eddie nodded. “I’m sorry, mister, but my answer-”

“-Is the same as theirs. Yeah. You know, I knew you wouldn’t do it.” The stranger got up, and wiped at the lapels of his coat. Eddie thought he saw a tear roll out of one of the deep eyes, but it was just as quickly gone.

“I’m sorry.”

The stranger looked at him wistfully, then past him.

“Eternal life just ain’t the promise it used to be. But I’ll survive.” He turned to go, then turned back. “It’s only a matter of time, you know. You’ve got three minutes, and she’s getting out of the cab right now. Make it count, Eddo.”

“Yes. Uh. Thank you.”

The stranger smiled and walked down the aisle, past the maitre’d, and out the front door. Barely a moment passed before Anna walked in, long locks of curly red hair falling over a forest green dress. She was magnificent. Eddie saw her searching for him, head darting left and right as she did it. He grinned, because at that moment he knew why he’d chosen to stay. Finally spotting him, her own face opened up into a smile, one of relief and comfort. She hurried over to his table, and slid into the space which had been occupied by the stranger only a moment before.

“Sorry I’m late, Eddie, I -”

“They look lovely, Anna.”

He was pointing at her shoes. They were dark brown, high heels with golden bows on each toe. She gave him a puzzled look. “What? Oh, yeah. You know, it was these darned shoes, that’s why I was-”

Before she could finish, Eddie was out of his seat and kneeling beside her.

“Anna Moss, I’ve waited my entire life for this moment. And now that it’s here...well, there’s just not enough time for me to say what I wanted to. Will you marry me?”

Her lips were trembling. She covered them with her hands, and her eyes were wet and shining. “Oh, Eddie. Yes, I’d love to.” He slid the ring from his pocket onto her finger and brought her into his arms. He put his lips to her ear. “If it’s you or forever, I’ll always choose you,” and though she didn’t know what he knew, Eddie was sure she could feel what he meant.

She kissed him. 
And like that, his lips on hers, their world ended.

---

The stranger watched it go, shoulders slumped, and let out a big sigh. He might have been crying, but when he turned away and began the walk between worlds, a grin began to tug at the corners of his mouth.
Where Eddie Carter’s world used to be, there remained only amemory, and a rising wave of wondrous, perfect laughter.


The Exploding Heads of Mesmerson County

# The Exploding Heads of Mesmerson County

The old man sat on the porch of the old house and rocked in his chair. One of the townspeople strolled by, a teenage boy named Bobby Steepleton that Arthur happened to recognize. Bobby had with him a bat and a glove, and glanced in Arthur's direction as he passed. On his way to the big game against the Richmond boys, who were supposedly bigger and better and...well, Bobby's shoulders were slumped and he didn't wave. But then, no one ever waved. The people of Mesmerson County couldn't see him. The girl scouts passed Arthur by, as did the mailman, and only once in a while would the Keatons' dog wander into his yard and look around, confused, before leaving again. The only real visitor he had anymore was Oscar.

Oscar was just as old, and maybe older, than Arthur. Outwardly, he liked to pretend he had a limp. His eyes were milked over to make people think he was blind and a mischievous grin usually spread itself over his wrinkled dark brown skin. He was no more an old black man than Arthur was an old white one, but the parts they played had become routine. Like their visits, their conversation, and the cane. Oscar would arrive unannounced, usually with a paper bag to drink from and a new cane. When he left, he'd most often leave the cane. Arther would hang it on the coat rack just inside the door like always, and in a day or two the cane would be gone.

About a minute after the Steepleton boy walked past, Oscar hobbled through the front gate and grinned up at him. Arthur nodded.

The cane was made of bamboo this time, with a grip made of tightly-wound reeds. Oscar tapped it up the steps of the porch and leaned it against the house and began to sit. The chair that made itself beneath him was a white wicker rocker, and the old black man let out a sigh that matched his age as his body folded into it.

“I hear there's a big game today.”

Arthur grunted. “Richmond. For the Valley Championship. Our boys are nervous.”

“How does it turn out?”

“Wouldn't you rather wait and see?”

Oscar raised an eyebrow. Arthur sighed, nodding.

“Gonna be close. We'll be down a couple runs, right up to the end, but we pull through. Last at-bat.”

Oscar snorted. He took a swig from his paper bag and gave Arthur a toothy grin. “That the best you can do, old man? Give them a walk-off win? Gee, ain't you a fun guy. So exciting. When you ever gonna mess things up? Throw the Mesmies for a loop?”

“You think they should lose?”

“It would be a start, way things go around here. Always looking bad before turning out okay. Your style is getting old.”

Arthur chewed at his bottom lip and thought. He was getting old.

“I mean, when's the last time you gave anyone cancer? Called up a car crash? Authored a killing in the heat of passion? Hell, when was the last time you made a tornado? Thunderstorm even? You let them off easy every time.”

“Can't help it, Oscar. I only think of the good things. Optimistic, I guess.”

“Not realistic, my man. None of it.”

Arthur shrugged. Bluebirds chirped and a warm breeze played through the willows. From next door, the smell of lilacs made it to him, along with the aroma of the sun-drenched strawberries in the patch across the street. There was nothing he loved more than summer, with its lazy days and its little dramas. Its games. Baseball, now there was a game.

Oscar had grown restless beside him. “Hey, hey,” he whispered, like he had a secret, “Old lady Henderson up the road is cooking a pie. Let's say when she goes to pull it out, she slips on the linoleum and goes headfirst into the thing. Roasts herself. Freak accident. Think about that for a minute.”

Arthur looked at Oscar out of the corner of his eye. “I like old lady Henderson. She's a fine lady. What happens instead is that she's for-gotten to set the timer. In an hour or so, she remembers that she's forgotten and panics, thinking she must have burned it. But it's fine, it's not burned at all. What's more, it's the best pie she's made in months.”

Oscar sat back. “You really are the most boring keeper I've ever run into. Most of those I can at least persuade.” There was amusement in his voice, like there always was, but there was something else too. Arthur thought it was disgust.

“I'm consistent. Not boring. And you can't tell me to think about something and have it happen. Doesn't work that way."

Oscar sighed. “Never hurts to try. Been workin' on you for more than a century now. You don't remember them old days, when we had some fun?”

Arthur did.

“That sort of thing doesn't do it for me anymore. You go anywhere else, any other county, and find chaos. Things happening without reason. Left up to chance. I like Mesmerson—I like that it's different than other places. It's better. I don't understand why you keep coming back, Oscar. It's not as if I let you work your mischief here.”

The old black man waved his hand. “Been everywhere else. Only place left to mess with is this place, and you got a grip on it. I respect that, you know. Keeps things interesting, having limitations.”

“Still, you tell me I'm boring.”

Oscar shrugged and drank some more. “The way you run this place is. You, I've liked you ever since I met you.”

Up the road, at the ball diamond, the Mesmerson boys had taken the field. The umpire had just finished brushing off home plate and had signaled for the game to start. Though they couldn't see the field, or hear the umpire's throaty “Play ball!” it wouldn't be a problem. Not for Arthur and Oscar.

“The game's about to start,” Arthur said.

“About time. Those boys in the red outfits, batting first—which are those?”

“Richmond.”

Arthur thought about it. The Richmond boys were fiendish baseball players, and their coach was the type who pounded winning at all costs into them with such force that nothing else ended up mattering. As  a result, the Richmond boys never seemed to lose. The Mesmerson team, who Arthur had watched every year since they'd started competing in the area little league tournament, did just as well, but always with a scrappy tenacity that gave them wins with close plays and clutch hits. It was strange to see, and even the Mesmerson coach didn't quite understand it—none of the kids on the team ever seemed to hit over .300, and the pitching always hovered around average. This was all Arthur's doing, of course. Winning was good for the kids and good for the town. Some of the older folks had even started down to the park on weekends to watch the games and cheer on the boys. It was good to see.

The Richmond boys scored twice before the first out came, a strikeout, which was followed by a walk and a groundout double play.

“Don't think about those Richmond boys, Arthur.” It came as a casual remark, but its tone was serious. Arthur looked sidelong at his companion.

“What? What are you on about, Oscar? I'm not thinking about them—they're doing it all themselves.”

“Just don't, that's all I'm saying.”

Arthur bit his lip. He started to think about the Richmond boys. Their cleanup hitter was a tall muscular boy named Howard Wendelmann. There was a rumor going around that he was fourteen, and therefore too old to be playing. He was also their pitcher, and he threw the ball at seventy miles an hour. The first two batters struck out on three swings each, and walked away shaking their heads. Batting third was Bobby Steepleton.

“Don't think about that Wendelmann boy, Arthur.”

Arthur thought about him. The boy was fourteen. He was also the recipient of a generous crop of facial hair which his coach made him shave away every day. And the coach, the coach knew Howard's age and still played him. Arthur didn't get angry much anymore these days, but he was a slight bit annoyed, and so he thought about Howard Wendelmann and the fourteen-year-old boy's next pitch.

Bobby Steepleton put it out of the park. The crowd went wild, and even down the road they could hear echoes of the roar. Arthur smiled a bit.

“You thought about him, didn't you? Even though I told you not to.”

“Couldn't help it.”

Arthur didn't see it but it was Oscar's turn to smile. He took an excited gulp of whatever was in his paper bag and licked his lips. Arthur thought about the Wendelmann boy again, and was satisfied to know that the shot had shaken him. His confidence was decimated, partly because of the home run but mostly because of the pitch. It was supposed to be a fastball but had ended up a fifty mile-per-hour floater. Right down the pipe. He walked the next batter before getting the last out on a line drive headed right for his face, snow-coning it in his glove just inches from his right eye. Arthur frowned a little – he hadn't meant for that to happen, not really. That was too close. Wendelmann hadn't been hurt, but still... He supposed he was getting a little too excited. He sat back in his rocking chair and took a deep breath, filtering the sweet summer air through the hair in his nostrils. Oscar sat beside him, dark fingers bridged, thumbs resting on his lower lip. The cane lay forgotten against the side of the house.

The game went on, Arthur orchestrating bits of it, and finally it was the bottom of the seventh inning, with the Richmond boys up by two. The final half-inning. The first two Mesmerson batters walked, and the Wendelmann boy was tired and nervous. His pitches had been erratic, and every time he thought he'd gotten his  control back something odd had happened. A slow pitch, a pitch way outside, some that looked as if they might hit batters. He couldn't figure it. The Richmond coach was upset, and Arthur could feel that he was  worried about losing. Not this game, the coach thought, not this game.

The next batter struck out, but on a pitch in the dirt so the two runners moved up  to second and third base.

Oscar grinned. “Was that you or him?”

“Him.” Arthur smiled.

“Listen,  Arthur,” Oscar said, leaning forward and putting a hand on the other man's knee, “This is important. You can't think about any of the Richmond boys. Don't do it. Not the third baseman, the shortstop, the second baseman, the fat first baseman, or any of the outfielders. Don't think about that Wendelmann boy or the coach.” Then, as if realizing he hadn't done his math right, Oscar added, “Don't think about the catcher either.”

“Why not?” Arthur asked.

“Just don't.”

The next pitch was to Steepleton, who socked a blooper up the middle, right over the second-baseman's head. The Mesmerson third base coach was waving his arms and the boy on second base was rounding third base and going home. Arthur was, of course, thinking about each of the players on the Richmond team. Nothing specific, but the stage had been set.

“Don't think about any of the Richmond boys, and whatever you do, Arthur, don't think about any of their heads exploding.”

Arthur's mouth dropped open, and so did Oscar's, into the widest grin he'd ever made.

Steepleton's hit would have been an in-the-park home run to win the game, but instead, Bobby quit running after rounding the bag between first and second and started screaming.

Eye Test


# Eye Test

Each morning these days is its own special jolt of happy lightning. Today is no exception. Today, Bobby Ray will announce a project he’s been working on for years.

Bobby Ray's job is extraordinary, he’s a revolutionary, and the work he does is necessary. He smiles big in the mirror, saying the words to himself.

“Extraordinary, revolutionary, necessary.” 

His teeth sparkle. He’s lucky, and the world is lucky to have a lucky him in it.

Until three years ago, Bobby Ray sat on the board of a think tank, an elite group of minds from around the world solving the world’s problems—a multicultural think tank with a vision of diversity and inclusion. So what if mostly white men like him ran the group? They were changing society for the better, shaking up the market, replacing predictable products with new toys and tech. 

“Extraordinary, revolutionary, necessary,” Bobby Ray whispers to himself as he steps out of the shuttle from his hotel.  

Out in the open, the mantra seems sillier.

His position in the think tank inspired Bobby Ray—so much he decided to turn his talents to invention, and used his capital to work alongside health industries—optometry, for instance. He paid scientists and researchers to develop his idea, and a working prototype ready to show—a rare situation for even the savviest business owners and entrepreneurs. The only remaining step was to pitch the product to a cadre of deep pockets investors and begin manufacturing.

The pitch is today. Today is the fulcrum of Bobby Ray's career. He’ll unveil his life’s work, his single shining contribution to humanity. 

“Extraordinary, revolutionary, necessary.” He says it to himself again, this time on stage at the event for the unveiling of his product.

The auditorium is filled with people. All millionaires at least. 

“Tell me,” he says, tapping his mic, “do you notice anything?”

There's a pause long enough that Bobby imagines his invention has failed. His pair is faulty, his presentation a no-go.

Then a woman’s voice, heartening him and breaking the tension. 

“There's lights in your eyes!”

And there are: eight small, bright blue ones, four in each eye. Bobby Ray closes his eyes. They can't see the lights from behind his eyelids.

He starts his pitch.

“Most meaningful communication among and between humans is non-verbal. Sure, we have language and we have writing, but if you really want to know if someone is your friend or is trying to hurt you, you need to see their face, look into their eyes.”

Bobby Ray is excited. He opens his eyes again.

Behold: eight purple sparkling eyeball lights.

“Imagine you could tell a person’s mood by basic color recognition. There'd be no more misunderstandings. Imagine if you could always tell if someone was lying. If you could prevent the killings of innocent people over simple misunderstandings? By undergoing a simple surgery, I am now the proud first owner of a set of lights in my eyes that respond to my mood on a chromatic scale. Red indicates anger, blue hope, green selfishness, purple passion, orange anxiety, yellow fear—a whole spectrum of colors up to white, which indicates instability, when someone is likely a danger to themselves or others. Combined with certain movements and rotations, these lights unlock a new world of possibilities for mapping nonverbal meaning between people. This project—“

“Why would anyone want that?” a man in the audience shouts out, interrupting him. “Who wants to get surgery to have their eyes snitch on them?”

The crowd laughs. Others chime in, agreeing with the heckler. Some even clap.

Bobby Ray swallows and keeps going.

“Imagine frictionless police encounters with citizens—each party knowing the emotions of the other.”

He closes his eyes again, bathing his audience in darkness. He keeps on through his speech, asking the millionaires to imagine scenarios as though they were wearing these lighted eyes.

He hears murmurs, people whispering to each other.

“Go on, what's the question?”

Someone speaks up, a man. “Do they let you see in the dark? Or through your eyelids?”

Bobby Ray shakes his head. “They don't do that, no.” 

More murmuring.

Bobby Ray keeps talking, finally coming to the culmination of his presentation. He unveils the name of the product (he's calling them Bright Eyes) and stands, eyes closed, waiting. This is the moment.

Only it isn't. He hears only meager applause and people talking in low voices to each other. Bobby Ray stands, awash in disbelief and rejection. Beads of sweat stream down his forehead. 

"For people who'd like to see the Bright Eyes up close, catch me near the back of the auditorium, where there are several buckets of beer."

The applause for beer is louder than the applause for Bright Eyes. Bobby Ray tries not to let it get to him, tries to keep himself from panicking. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, nothing he visualized had been anywhere near this underwhelming.

In the back of the auditorium he drinks beer after beer, trying to make polite conversation with the attendees willing to approach him. 

Every suspicious look and demeaning question about the implications of his invention feels like a punch in the gut. At some point his fists clench. He's run out of patience.

A woman is comparing Bright Eyes to the mark of the Beast. To his face.

“Shut up!” he yells at her. The lights in his eyes are a fiery red, eight spinning sources flashing rapidly. The room goes silent as everyone turns their attention toward them. 

“I've spent the last three years of my life on this project,” Bobby Ray seethes at the woman. She shrinks away.  Bobby keeps going. “I won’t be belittled by some religious zealot selling fear. Bright Eyes are a force for good!” 

The four lights in each eye spin faster. 

“You can see the utility of my invention, you see it in use right now! How can you not envision a world where liars are done away with? What would happen if politicians could no longer make false promises? If lawyers couldn't sway juries with lies? What if you no longer had to guess what mood your partner is in? These benefits aren’t _obvious_ to you?” 

The lights spin faster still, until two rings of angry crimson shine in his eyes.

A man steps between them and raises a hand, like he's about to reach into a bee’s nest.

“Uh…Mister Bobby Ray?” The man’s voice trembles. Bobby Ray nods, catching himself. He's losing it.

“If your Bright Eyes are put on the market, how can you expect anyone to choose to have them…installed? You said it's a surgery?” 

Bobby Ray looks around. He sees plainly in their eyes their fear, frustration and anxiety. Many of them shift uncomfortably. He clears his throat. Suddenly this idea isn’t so thrilling. The lights in his eyes dim, the spirals spin slower. 

“Bright Eyes are an extraordinary, revolutionary, necessary step. If the market doesn't adopt them, I suppose I'll lobby for mandatory adoption. Start with prison populations and go from there.”

“You want everyone to have them?” someone asks. Bobby Ray feels diminished, attendees forming a wall that surrounds him, towers over him. 

“Ideally, yes. Bright Eyes would work best that way.” 

More voices lend themselves to the spray of verbal abuse now directed at Bobby Ray:

>“If you need surgery to get them, how do you upgrade?"

>“I’m all for privacy infringement, but how would you monetize this product?”

>“How would these eyes help the world? The way I see it, exposing everyone's true feelings will only cause more violence.”

>“It still seems like the mark of the Beast if you ask me.”

>“You’d force kids to get eye surgery? How safe is it? Not my kids.”

>“Is it reversible? Are you going to be stuck with these lights?”

>“This is the most ridiculous publicity stunt for funding I've ever seen.”

Bobby Ray sways, dizzy. The lights in his eyes are a pale yellow, swooping slowly around and between each other.

He struggles to speak.

“I...It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I made a mistake. What I said about mandatory adoption was a mistake.”

A waterfall of new voices falls on him, asking him more questions. He sinks beneath the waterfall, tumbling in his mind, his own failure dashing him against the rocks again and again. The waterfall’s sound changes, the dull roar expanding a thousandfold. A voice chants in his head, mocking him. 

“Extraordinary, revolutionary, necessary. Extraordinary, revolutionary, necessary.” 

It's all he can hear.

He falls to his knees and his stomach, overtaken by teething butterflies, empties itself on the floor.

The lights in his eyes are white.


The Five Trillion Faces of Television


# The Five Trillion Faces of Television

Television had arms and legs and a flat bright face capable of putting out any combination of three hundred seven thousand, two hundred pixels. Each pixel had the potential to be any of sixteen million, five-hundred eighty-one thousand, three hundred seventy-five colors, sixty times a second.

(His old friend Calculator, always making useless observations, would have told him that the number of possible faces Television could make was five trillion, ninety-three billion, seven hundred ninety-eight million, four hundred thousand in total--but Calculator was dead. Trampled by a stampede of gazelles the previous summer.)

The men in Television's family had a problem nobody could solve. They kept themselves inside and when they had to get through doorways they turned sideways. Some of the unluckier of them, like his oldest brother Peter, spent all day faces to the ground, unable to move.

Television was lucky.

Television’s head was just right, and though he felt guilty for his high-definition deficiency, he was grateful his head was light enough to keep on his shoulders. People would kill for a face like his. He could show any image, reduced to a native resolution of six hundred forty by four eighty, in full color. If he’d done any thinking about what a blessing this was, he might have become a rich and powerful man. Instead, Television took what life gave him. He made tenuous connections, like with his coworkers at the storage building. He engaged in terse conversation with a woman called Lamp who worked the register at Capital Video.

The face he most often made was a neutral gray, same as when he slept. He slept most nights, it was cheaper than going out and he saved on electricity. When Television slept, he dreamed of many events - foremost of which seemed always to be making it with Lamp, even though the only time he felt attracted to her was in the dream. When he saw her at the video store, with her knobby knees and ovoid wooden chest, he found himself wanting to display a picture of disgust (the one he’d chosen was of an old and warty looking toaster man who had two fingers down his bread-slots, chrome glistening with tears) but he looked away, pretending he’d done so because her face gave off too many Watts.

When he came home from Capital Video, he slid the tape into his slot and sat wonderingly as his face made hundreds of thousands of wondrous images in a row. He forgot about his strange dream-lust for Lamp, and the way his subconscious seemed intent on viewing her plug. After the video had played through, and his face was numb with static and glowing dully in the dark, Television lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, where the ghosts of his faces danced. Then he would fall asleep, and this was when he dreamed of the perfect combination.

_The perfect combination._

In the dream, he understood everything about it - there was one face he could make in any situation that would help him achieve the desired outcome. One combination of color, of pixels in or out of order.

It wasn’t something he understood while conscious, because when he woke up his head was all muzzy and there was still a static charge built up between his speaker and his buttons that would shock him when he adjusted his antenna. By then he had forgotten all about it. If he had managed to remember his dreams about the perfect combination, it’s possible that he would have messed around trying to find it, and might have been doing that instead of going to the Post Office on Thursday afternoon.

He went there to mail a letter to the woman of his dreams, a beautiful big-bodied black nymphette named Refrigerator. He wasn’t sure what kind of love letters Refrigerator liked, because she’d never responded to his previous attempts. Television wasn’t even sure she remembered him from high school, but he had a good feeling about this next letter. Here is what it said:

“My dearest Refrigerator, I hope this letter finds you well and in good health. Since my last letter I've been lucky. On Monday I woke up and found a newspaper on my doorstep, even though I don’t get the newspaper. The Sun Times.The day before I had been downtown and encountered a tall blender-headed man wearing a full-bodied bib yelling, ‘Sun Time! Sun Time! Sun Time man, Sun Time son!’ and I considered giving him the fifty cents for a copy. Lucky that I did not! On Tuesday my gas was supposed to be shut off, but they must not have noticed, because it wasn’t until last night that I ran out of hot oil. I think the luckiest I’ve been so far is me right now, writing these words. I imagine you reading them, smiling, perhaps even giving your expansion valve a quick tickle. But I am not writing to be presumptuous.

I am writing, my glad lass, because today I love you. Again.

Yours, Television.”

On the back of the single sheet of triple-folded paper inside of the envelope was a list of the ways Television had been lucky since his last letter. The last item on the list was, ‘Lucky to mail this letter to such a splendid gal.’

And so Television walked to the Post Office, which was full of men in business suits who all seemed to have some variation of facsimile device resting on their shoulders. Television didn’t get along well with these types, so he kept to the back of the line and tried not to display any of his dislike faces. He held his letter between thumb and forefinger. There was a box to drop it in, but he needed a stamp, and only had a plastic card to pay with instead of the coins he needed for the stamp machine. He didn’t like putting coins in the machine anyway.

It made him feel dirty.

He was waiting like this when the door busted open and a thick muscular sort of man came through, waving what looked like a gun in the air. His head was an elongated radio with two large speakers on either side.

“GET ON THE FLOOR AND PUT YOUR MONEY ON THE COUNTER,” the man with the boombox face boomed. His speakers pulsed behind the pantyhose. He had no screen, and Television supposed having one way to look had forced the man to adopt the personality others must always have assumed he had. Rather sad. The other people in the post office began to drop, trying to comply with the boombox’s nonsensical demands. They started pulling money from their pockets.

Television stood. He wasn’t sure what he thought about the situation, except for that he was slightly annoyed that he might not get to mail the letter.

“Do you mean, instead,” his speakers pulsed, “That we should put our money on the counter and then get on the floor?”

The robber seemed confused, and stepped forward as if to strike Television, so Television sat down. The robber looked to the others.

“DO WHAT HE SAID. GET UP SLOW AND PUT YOUR MONEY ON THE COUNTER. THEN GET DOWN AND PUT YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK WHERE I CAN SEE THEM.”

Television got up again. He was the only one standing, and the robber turned toward him.

The facsimile men pleaded with Television with their hands for him to sit down, but they didn't understand. Television had to mail a letter, and if he couldn't do it today? He would have to wait another whole day. Postal employees had the rest of the day off after a robbery, didn’t they? What if he kept getting lucky? He
could see himself opening the envelope and rewriting it all to include the day’s events. Maybe if he could get a stamp and drop it in the blue box before the mail truck left.

“Excuse me,” Television pulsed at the robber, “Do you have a stamp? I need a stamp for this letter.”

The robber backed away, still waving his pistol.

“YOU THERE, WITH THE GLOWING FACE. STOP TALKING TO ME. I HAVE THE GUN. NO STAMP.”

Television displayed consternation (which was a repeating loop of film that showed a microwave-headed man finding himself at a path's forked junction and raising his arms to grasp the sides of his head in mock horror), and took a step forward.

“Sir, since you have the gun and hold the power over us, could you ask and see if anyone else here has a stamp I could borrow?” The robber shook his head, his angry expression made one of incredulity by its movement.

“SOMEONE WITH A STAMP, GIVE THIS MAN A STAMP SO HE WILL SHUT UP. THEN PUT YOUR MONEY ON THE COUNTER AND GET BACK ON THE GROUND.”

Before he could move, the facsimile men were stuffing stamps into Television’s hand, all kinds. They rattled the phones on their heads and made their buttons buzz. Some shot heated paper bits with writing on them into the air. “Please don’t shoot,” printed on some, on others, “I have a job.” Television thought if any of the men had families, they'd have printed that instead.

The men shuffled toward the counter and started dumping piles of cash and coins there. The postal workers did the same, calling back for more when the collection appeared meager. Mail bags were brought forward, envelopes ripped open. Money rained down.

Television stood where he was. The robber turned to Television, motioning with his gun that he’d like him to go to the counter and drop some money, like the rest of the people had.

Television's face became an embarrassing ensemble of humorous mishaps culled from a video of bloopers.

“Oh, this is awkward, since I never carry cash.” He pulled out the plastic card, which made the boom box man jump, and held it out. “I only debit. I can tell you my PIN number so you can get to my bank account. I think there’s fourteen or fifteen dollars in there.”

The robber seemed to spend more time thinking. Then he waved his gun dismissively.

“KEEP THE CARD.”

Television put it back into his pocket. The others had gotten back onto the floor, and were crossing their arms behind their backs. The robber stepped forward and collected his bags of money. These he put by the door. Then he turned back to the shuddering mass and Television.

“I’M GOING TO KILL ONE OF YOU BEFORE I GO, SO THAT NEXT TIME I COME HERE I GET THE RESPECT I DESERVE. DOES ANY OF YOU WANT TO VOLUNTEER?”

None of the other men raised a hand, and neither did Television. What was working against him was the fact that he had never sat back down. The robber walked over to him and put the gun to his screen.

“HOW NICE OF YOU,” the boombox boomed.

The barrel of the gun touched Television’s glass and he felt it make a scratch. He almost protested, but then he realized something. Something that seemed important, even in relation to the fact that he hadn’t yet chosen even one of the stamps in his hand to peel off and stick onto his envelope to Refrigerator.

The realization was this: he was about to die.

The faces he made then were random, a compilation of all those faces he was saving up to use someday. A small mixer-headed girl on a swing set. A tree knocked down and sawed apart. Seven men jumping in the air all at the same time. A box with a latch on it. While he made these faces his mind tried to bring him back to his dream about the perfect combination, and being so flustered as he was with the realization that his letter might not get to Refrigerator and that even if it did he would be dead and couldn’t enjoy her assumed reception of it, he listened to what it said.

Here is what Television’s mind said: “There is a combination of pixels so perfect that will make this man want to keep us alive instead of killing us.” Since he’d never spent time trying to concoct the perfect combination, he was in a bad place. He’d have to throw something together, and hope.

“Would you wait one moment, sir?”

The robber cocked his gun. Television peeled a stamp apart. He affixed it to the corner of the envelope addressed to Refrigerator, all the while imagining different combinations of pixels. He chose one as the man was about to pull the trigger.

“I’M ABOUT TO PULL THE TRIGGER.” The robber's booming was hard to hear over the clacking and chattering of phones in carriages and buttons from the facsimile-headed men.

Television made a face - a woman’s torso, naked except for a pair of bright pink underwear.

“If you delay your putting a hole in my head,” Television said, “I can give you a peek at what goes on beneath the underwear.”

He was stalling, had in fact not been able to come up with any combination of pixels he would have considered perfect. This seemed to be working, but an even bigger problem loomed. The robber stepped back.

“YES I WOULD LIKE TO SEE UNDER THE PANTS.”

The bigger problem was this: Television didn’t know what went on beneath the underwear. He’d never been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of it. On his face, the underwear came off, but instead of whatever the robber had been expecting was a large blurry ball. “If you delay your putting a hole in my head for a little longer, I will unblur the ball.” The robber nodded.

“YES UNBLUR THE BALL I WANT TO SEE HER PLUG.”

Television considered. He could, perhaps, buy himself a little more time to make sure the perfect combination was extra perfect. He unblurred the ball. He displayed what he’d always imagined the female genitalia to look like, and waited. If he could delay the boombox-headed man a few seconds before he showed the perfect combination...

The robber paused, as if fogged with arousal, and then brought up the gun.

POP.

Television’s face shot outward, covering the robber in shards of glass and drops of color. The heads of the facsimile men rang shrilly and panicked, they reached to answer their own calls. Television fell to his knees.

As he died, he thought again of rewriting the letter. Instead of adding to all the lucky bits, he would tear it up and start new.

The new letter, the one Television would never write, went like this: “My dearest Refrigerator, I hope this finds you well. Regrettable that I won’t be able to join you for our first date. You see, my darling, I made it look too much like a squid.”


Footprints on a Hapless Moon


# Footprints on a Hapless Moon

The train station was ten minutes from Jack Rigby's house, and the only things he’d come back with were two bags and a coat he wasn’t wearing.

He wanted to walk down the tracks and cross just behind the train, but he thought someone might yell at him. So he took his things to a sun-heated stone bench and waited. Other passengers wandered into the parking lot, greeting family members and friends who were there to take them where they were going next. No one looked at Jack. Three Amtrak employees, each responding to some signal from the lead car, picked up their yellow stepping stools and got on.

He wondered what it would be like to work as a train jockey. Wake up one morning, take a bus to Union Station, get on a train, ride for four or five hours, get off, get on a train headed back to Chicago. As infuriating as the delays were for the passengers (at one point, they’d come to a coasting halt just short of the Kalamazoo stop while switches were unglued) Jack couldn’t imagine dealing with stoppages every day, all while trying to placate every red-faced passenger demanding news about when the train would be running again. At least it was a job.

There would be no jobs for Jack this summer. He'd applied to more than a few retail sales positions, the kind they seemed to give to just anyone, and hadn’t heard from any. He’d only been brave enough to call back four of them. He didn’t like the way his voice sounded on the phone. One stutter, one gulp, and they’d know he wasn’t cut out for retail. He didn’t want to be cut out for it. His Linguistics degree, his green cap and gown were useless in retail. Maybe he was just another victim of the economy, and he just had to get out of Michigan. The thought didn’t make him feel any less inconsequential.

Another minute and the train was gone, bells and red lights clogging traffic across the road adjoining the station parking lot.

As he stepped across the tracks and looked back West, toward Chicago, he thought about his mother.

Three days ago she called with a hitch in her voice. “I’m having surgery tomorrow morning. On my neck. They have to replace one of my discs to release a pinched nerve, and then fuse my two vertebrae together.”

He’d been riding his bike, but he had to stop and get off so he could think.

“They go in through the front,” she said, “and push my esophagus and windpipes to the side, so they can get back to where my spine is.”

_They go in through the front._ Jack shuddered. If the surgeon slipped, if it was different in there than he’d thought...

But the surgery had gone well. The next day Jack surprised her with a vase of flowers and a kiss on the cheek. The train from Lansing only took four hours, and he’d found a cheap ticket. Now he was back.

Across the road from the train station was the grocery store where he’d parked his bike, a Schwinn Varsity racer from the '80’s that he’d bought from a kid for seventy dollars. He settled the duffel bag across the crotch bar and got on, balancing it gingerly until he got up to speed.

Three minutes later, he was home. The house was a modest white two-story box, reminiscent of the modular housing kick of the fifties. The neighborhood was nice too, like something straight out of the picket fence era. One of the neighbors had, instead of a trim and tidy lawn, an impressively groomed parcel of dirt.

There were two cars in the driveway - his and Marcy’s. He liked Marcy, more than he wanted to because she was obnoxious. She bragged about things she cleaned, or painted, and was always complaining about the latest boy who had loved and left her. Toward Jack, she was either warmly engaging or closed off and suspicious, keeping him off balance. She pricked him with comments about his wardrobe or hairstyle, and he did his best to riposte, pretending it was a game between them. But he never knew for sure.

Branson was in Ann Arbor babysitting his brother’s kids, Jessica was in Europe with her boyfriend, and Erin had just moved out. It would be him and Marcy until his lease ended and he moved to Chicago for good.

So as he locked his bike and carried his bags to the door, he was both excited and wary. He would take his things to his basement room, and if he heard her in the kitchen, he might come up and try his luck at small talk. If that didn’t happen, well - he was in the midst of a hardcover anthology of short stories, which were perfect for his ever-waning attention span.

His room was a cement square in one corner of the basement, a cubicle with a door. Cool in the summer, and the sunken windows let in just the right amount of light. They let in other things, too. Rain, if he left them open. Stray cats. Frogs. One cat, a brown and white tom, was Jack’s friend. One day, after a long afternoon bike ride, he found it sitting on the chair in front of his computer. He asked Marcy and Branson if they knew where it had come from, but neither had seen it before. Jack let it out the front door, but by the time he got back to his room, it was sitting on his chair again.

Since then, they’d established a routine. A meow at the window would wake Jack sometime around three in the morning, after which he’d let the cat in, feed it cereal, snuggle with it for a few minutes, and put it back outside.

He named it Spaghettio.

Ten minutes after he’d carried his bags inside he heard Marcy in the kitchen. He gave himself a cursory look in the mirror and walked to the bottom of the stairwell. He was about to go up but saw she was standing there, at the top, looking at him.

"You’re back.”

He nodded.

“Do you have time to do me a favor?” Did he have time? The question supposed he had a schedule. He wasn’t even going to ask what the favor was.

“Sure.”

“Come smoke with me. I hate doing it alone; it makes me feel like a stoner.”

This was the first Marcy had wanted to do anything with him alone, even if it happened to be drugs. Jack agreed.

In her room, she produced a sandwich bag with a bud of dried marijuana. She picked it apart meticulously and packed the pieces into the bowl of a glass pipe.

“I don’t get high,” Jack said.

Marcy stopped what she was doing and looked at him.

“You said you’d smoke with me.”

“That’s not what I meant. I’ll smoke with you. It’s just never gotten me high. I’m immune.”

She grinned. “This is potent weed.”

“Someone always says that.”

He lit the bowl and let the smoke gather in his lungs. He let it out. Contrary to his conviction, the drug did its work on him.

“I told you it was potent. It’s a new plant - a hybrid of marijuana and peyote. A cactus weed.”

He stared at her in horror until she busted up laughing. He’d been preparing himself for a vision quest. What would it be? Would he have an animal guide? But there was no peyote in the pot, and now she was trying to get him to play video games.

“I don’t think I can,” he argued, explaining he felt he was already a character in a video game played by someone on a different plane of reality.

“I’m a glove, and someone’s hand is wearing me. Only it’s not a perfect fit. The fingers are too thin. I can’t play video games while I feel like I’m in one. It’s too…recursive.”

She laughed, and he realized what he was saying. The bowl was out. Marcy told him she was going to bed, that she had to be up for her summer statistics class in the morning.

Jack went to his room in rough shape, nearly tumbling down the wooden staircase and sprawling on the concrete. He caught himself, giggling, and made it into his bed, where the dark spun around him. The basement was muggy, air stagnant and full of moisture. He gagged on his breath.

The windows were just below ground level, sitting in little wells cut from the soil. Jack wanted to open them, kept picturing himself rising to do the job, but his body wouldn’t let him. Wait, his body pleaded. Just a few more minutes.

A few more minutes and the voice sounded like a cat outside his window. Spaghettio was out there. Jack pulled himself upright and went to the window, feeling like he was on stilts. He pushed the window open, and the cat launched itself at him, landing on his shoulder. Jack staggered but managed to stay upright. Spaghettio ran under his bed.

“Why are you acting crazy, kid?”

The cat didn’t answer and didn’t come out. Jack pulled the window shut. He didn’t trust himself to walk back to bed. He took two steps and jumped. Spaghettio yowled from somewhere, and Jack held on to the bed’s sides, aware that the way everything was spinning he might be bucked off any moment.

Time passed.

Rushing water, roaring winds. Had he fallen asleep? The dark still spun, but now it was punctuated by white stabs of light that penetrated his eyelids and thunder that ripped into his head. The thunder was distant yet immediate, and shook the house ten seconds at a go.

The wells would be filling now, his windows would be half underwater, and Jack was glad he’d let Spaghettio in when he had. He was glad the windows were shut, despite the nauseating thickness of the air. He pushed himself off the bed and knelt on the concrete.

He vomited in rhythm with the rocking of the house. It sounded like a bomb going off, felt like a shockwave rolling through him. Jack was covered in sweat when he finished, so he peeled off his clothes and crawled back in bed. A sudden chill took over him, but at least he felt better.

The storm slackened.

The door at the top of the stairs opened. Marcy's quick steps startled him, and then she was in his room. Even in the dark, he could tell she'd been crying.

“I had a bad dream.”

“Oh, oh.”

He got up and went to the closet before attempting to console her. He threw a towel on the puke so she wouldn’t see, and went to her.

“Are you all right?”

She shook her head. “I can’t go back to sleep. The storm…I dreamed something bad happened to my sister’s little boy. I can’t talk about it.”

“Here, come over here. I can’t stand very well.”

He fell to his knees beside the bed. She stood there for a moment and then knelt down by him.

“Did you…it smells like vomit in here.”

“The cat did it.”

“The cat?”

“Under the bed.”

As if to prove Jack right, Spaghettio made a deep purring noise, nearly a growl.

“Oh.”

She put her hands on his forearms and pulled them gently upward. He pushed himself off the ground, and they both sat on the bed.

“I know you’re the one with the bad dream, and I don’t know how you feel about me, but - would you lay with me?”

Marcy nodded in the dark, and Jack let himself go limp in her arms. It felt good, being this close. He shivered against her warmth.

“Jack, you’re sweating, but you’re so cold. I’ll get you some water.”

“No. No water. Just…lay with me.”

Another few moments and he was out again.

He dreamed he was with Marcy on the side of some Western mountain. Wyoming, or Nevada. They climbed without urgency, without fatigue. She was in front, and he watched her lithe body move - she was an elk, he was a goat. Every so often she looked back and smiled at him. Finally, they reached the top. Marcy took off her pack, and then each piece of clothing she had, one by one. Jack stood there, unable to move, unable to look away. She was nude. She came to him.

“It may seem terrible, but everything's all right. It’s time for a change, you know that.”

“What do you mean?”

She pointed behind her, to the horizon. In front of it was a rocky steppe that came to an abrupt end. Marcy turned away from him and ran toward it. Jack wanted to cry out, warn her, but couldn’t. He got his legs working, running after. He caught up to her just as they came to the cliff’s edge, and then they were falling.

“Kiss me,” she said, and Jack woke up.

Marcy’s face was less than ten inches from his. She had turned toward him in her sleep, and her head was tilted back like she was about to tell him a secret. Her face was pale and freckled in the dim light from the waterlogged windows, and her lips were pulled forward in a pout that made them look like soft pink pillows.

He leaned toward her, unaware that he was doing it, unable to bring anything to his mind but the dream of falling. The girl in his bed who had so often annoyed him in her loud way, jousted with him over unwashed dishes and dirty bathtubs, looked peaceful here. A still life.

Jack kissed her forehead.

Her eyes ever fluttered open, until she came awake. Spaghettio meowed. The cat had come out from under Jack’s bed and was sitting near the door, looking at them.

“Is that that cat?”

It was. “I named it Spaghettio,” Jack said, “It hangs out in here sometimes.”

Marcy rolled over and pushed herself out of bed.

“It wants to go upstairs,” she said. Jack felt her absence. He was cold. Marcy opened the door, and the cat shot through the opening. She followed, but just before her head was out of sight, she looked back at him and gave him a guilty smile.

“I’ll come back after I pee.”

Jack put his face in his pillow. He’d never been attracted to anyone he lived with before. When she came back - what would she expect?

As it turned out, he needn’t have worried. Not about impending cuddles, or the job market, or the economy. When Marcy came back it wasn’t to crawl in bed with him again, but to whisper with wide eyes about an orange sky and black snow.

He walked outside with her and held her hand because she asked him to. They took battery acid breaths. A cough collected in the back of Jack’s throat, but when he tried to expel it all he could manage was a wheeze. He went back for hand towels and wet them with toilet water. There was no electricity.

They put the towels over their faces and began to walk, marveling at the damage. The ground was covered in three inches of ash, each step they took stamping a perfect shoe-print in its canvas. _One small step. Footprints on a hapless moon_, he thought.

It was ten or eleven in the morning, but the sky was still dark and tinted a bloody orange like after sunset.

They didn’t talk until they walked a quarter of a mile up the road, to Michigan Avenue. They didn’t comment on the streets filled with empty cars, or the men who staggered from the west like zombies, clothes melted to them. Amid the screaming and sirens, they communicated with hand squeezes and wide eyes.

They came to Harrison and Michigan Avenue, scarcely recognizable under all of the ash that still fell, and looked downtown, toward the ever-visible Capitol Building.

Gone. In its place was a tower miles high, feeding black ash into the clouds. _Nuked the Capitol,_ Jack thought.

He tried not to think about his mother in Chicago, tried not to imagine a country where every major city had been blown to kingdom come.

Marcy looked at him. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know. We could go home.”

Marcy shook her head and looked back downtown.

“I want to see where it all went. Where it all came from.”

She stepped forward. She kept going.

Jack stood in the road in boxers with a wet towel over his face. His skin, warm like he’d been doing early afternoon yard work under a summer sun. The ash that fell on him tickled and stung, and the screams and sirens kept on.

He watched Marcy for almost a minute, her lithe body moving toward the bomb. She was an elk. He was a goat.

---

He got his legs working.


For the Love of Lilly

From Scratch


# From Scratch

Todd wasn’t late to work yet, but the way the lady ahead of him was driving, he didn’t have a chance of making it on time.

Her brown Mercury, apparently some ancient species of car, had only a moment earlier eked through a yellow light, leaving him idling at the red, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. When it finally turned green he sped through several blocks, feeling like he might have a chance but there she was again, trundling forward—the same car. Going twenty miles an hour.

Traffic toward him was steady. He couldn’t pass if he wanted to. It was infuriating, but Todd could only be mad at himself. If he’d left even a minute earlier, he’d be ahead of her, he’d have a chance.

“There was this woman in this shitmobile, Mr. Shannock,” he said to himself. “You understand.”

Todd watched with increasing dismay as the lady in the shitmobile took each one of the turns he intended to take at a glacial pace. He knew it wasn’t like this, but it started to feel like the lady in the brown Mercury was out to ruin his life. Like she was glancing up at her rear-view mirror and laughing mirthfully every time she saw him there.

A dull itch rested at the crown of his cranium, roughly the size of a dime. Pulling along at a measly twenty miles an hour, Todd touched a finger where he thought it was and scratched once, tentatively, a single fingernail running across his scalp. It felt good.

His fingernails weren’t as long as he would have wanted due to habitual chewing, but it still felt so good to scratch. He almost forgot how annoyed he was with the slowmobile ahead of him.

When it looked like she was going to slow down and turn into a driveway he mashed his teeth together, but it turned out to be a false alarm; probably she had forgotten how to push the gas pedal. She kept on, and so did the minute hand on his watch.

He didn’t even want to look.

They passed through a school zone and the old lady slowed to ten miles per hour.

“Oh, come on,” he said aloud to himself. “This is getting excessive.”

Cars behind him started to honk. It seemed he was only the very front of a long snake of cars formed by accretion. Probably all suffering the same frustrating internal monologues. Todd hoped they could see he wasn’t the problem. It was this damned woman in front of him!

He rolled down his window, and outside it was cool, humid. “Drive faster!” he wanted to yell out of it, “You’ll live longer!” But he was timid, so he rolled the window back up.

He scratched the itch again, which felt good, but also he could feel the skin behind his head was raised and warm, and with ridges like a potato chip. Not in a big area, but had it felt like this a second ago?

_Huh. Something bit me?_

Anyway, it felt real good to scratch it, so he did it harder. The lady in the car ahead finally took a right but by then he didn’t care anymore.

Inside him were wonderful feelings he’d never had, it was a peace, and a pleasure, and things felt just _fine_. The more he scratched the more of a better _person_ it felt like he was becoming. This was what he’d been missing. This was living!

The driver in the car behind Todd’s laid on his horn. The itch that had been the center of his attention for the last thirty seconds was gone.

He was only going fifteen miles an hour, and the lady in front of him was no longer in front of him.

He stomped on the gas and drove, feeling a little out of sorts, not even noticing the smear of blood his fingertips left on the steering wheel.

He arrived at work eighteen minutes late. On the way up to the fifth floor, where his office was, he kept his head down.

When no one seemed to notice his tardiness, he straightened up, plastered on a smile, and walked to his cube. He hadn’t run into his boss, and that was good.

He sat down in his task chair and yawned. _I’m really going to get something done._ Then he noticed the little sticky note on his monitor.

He snatched it off.

_My office_, it said. Then, with a downward scrawl, it had the initials _M.S._: Martin Shannock. His boss’s boss. Todd stood up, feeling bad. _Time to face the music._

“Come in,” Shannock called through the door when he knocked. The man was in his overlarge chair behind his desk and was now fiddling with a pen.

“Mr. Baron.”

Something about the man unnerved Todd. His boss held his head cocked to the side and with flared nostrils, like he was gathering the stink of his victim’s fear.

“You wanted to see me?”

His boss’s head swiveled like a desk lamp, pinpointing the exact location of Todd’s face. He smiled without humor. Todd tried to keep a neutral facial expression.

“Seems you weren’t here on time today. I hear it’s not such an out of the ordinary thing for you. How can you expect me to keep my employees motivated if their coworkers don’t show up? Do you need this job?”

Sweat broke out on the back of Todd’s neck.

“Mr. Shannock, sir, I _did_ show up, it’s just I had...” There was no end to the sentence. Shannock finished it for him.

“Had more important things to do? Things that couldn’t wait until after work? There are going to be some changes around here.”

“I understand that, sir. I just made a mistake this time. It won’t happen again.”

“You’re right—it won’t. You have till the end of the day to pack up your things and be out of here.”

“Mr. Shannock—”

His boss reached out and jammed a button on his intercom.

“Security?”

“Don’t bother,” Todd said, and left.

Cleaning out his desk was fairly simple; the only things that occupied it regularly had been himself, his computer, and a series of binders and legal pads he kept in one of the drawers. He pulled them out one-by-one as he bent over, and put them on the floor. The thinly-carpeted floor helped to muffle the noise, but his coworkers were already sticking their necks out of their cubicles.

Hot-eared and prickling he kicked shut the drawer, snatched up the box and speed-walked to the elevator. He felt the silent gaze of the whole floor on him as he pressed the down button.

“Merry Christmas everyone!” he yelled. It was November.

As soon as he stepped in he heard them start to talk.
The elevator stopped on the fourth floor. A small, homely woman stepped on and made eye contact. She nodded at Todd; he grimaced. She stood beside him, facing the door.

“Hope you find a place to work,” she said.

He tried to think of the last time he was really happy. He thought about driving to work, in the car. That itch. As he thought of it the box he was holding seemed to get heavier, and he knelt to put it down.

Then he was rubbing the ridgy potato chip on the back of his neck again, feeling it swell to his fingertips and plead for his nails, so he scratched.

He was in an elevator, but inside him the sun was rising.
“Are you...are you all right, mister?” The homely woman with mousy hair was turned to him, half-worried, but Todd could tell she was just as eager to leave the elevator.

Todd didn’t answer. Or he did, but it came from his eyes. _If only you could see._

He scratched harder.

The small woman whimpered, moving herself further into the corner of the elevator. Todd took no notice.

The door opened and the woman fled, crying out in scared little gasps. Todd’s scalp was split open atop his head and still he scratched, both hands going wildly now. Blood pooled and ran off him, ran down his face and collected in small drops on the elevator floor. The drops joined other drops and no one got on. The door closed. By the time Todd reached the first floor the itch had once again disappeared, and both of his hands were stained red.

Back in the car, Todd swooned. The purple tree hanging from his rearview mirror seemed to dance. He fumbled with the keys, and they kept slipping out of his hands. Finally he was able to jam one of the bloody keys into the ignition and start the car.

He was on the highway, on the way home, where he would tell his mother—no, he no longer lived there, his parents no longer lived there.

He’d hopped on the freeway to get to a home that hadn’t been home for more than fifteen years.

He pulled over. His head rocked against the steering wheel and he was aware he’d pass out soon. The loss of blood or the pain would do it, although the pain wasn’t as bad anymore. He struggled to look out his side-view mirror, feeling giddy.

His door was jerked open and he pulled out of the car by a pair of burly, men in blue suits.

“Get on the ground!” they yelled at him. “Put your hands behind your back!” Todd was so surprised he was giggling, and they slammed his head down onto the road as a car came by. The headlights looked pale to him. Cold metal circlets were tightened around his wrists, and the cops were off him.

They began to talk. Todd wasn’t exactly interested, but he listened, or tried to, as he passed in and out of consciousness.

> “What the hell?”
> “Looks like he beat the shit out of himself. Look at his hands.”
> “Never mind his hands, look at his head. He’s scalped himself or something.”
> “We need to get him to the hospital; he’s losing too much blood.”
> “Let’s leave him—they’ll just say we did it if we bring him in”
> “I can’t do it, Homer”
> “Okay, you grab his legs…”

Todd swam deep.

> “…arms…put his…ok…fuck…sure you…hospital?”
> “Arby’s first.”

The itch woke him. Streetlights washed over him in quick spurts. He could see the bars that separated him from the police who’d captured (or rescued) him. He heard the muffled radio going. This was the regular radio, not police band radio which the men in blue use to spout such jargon as “What’s your twenty?” and “Ten-four, good buddy.” Or was it truckers who said that? He couldn’t remember.

Todd tried to pull his hands up to his head, but his cuffs were attached to some sort of hook in the back of the seat. He couldn’t scratch.

A face appeared behind the wire mesh.

“Settle down back there,” he said, the cop in the passenger seat, the one who’d wanted to stop at Arby’s, “we’re almost to the hospital.”

Todd didn’t mean to do it but he lurched forward, wide-eyed with desperation. “I have to...I have to scratch! Unhook me quick!” He sat up and leaned forward, face almost to the bars.

“Looks like you’ve already done enough damage scratching,” Arby’s said. “Why don’t you just lie back down? We’ll be to the hospital in a minute.” Then, to his driving partner, “Hurry the hell up, Homer. This guy’s a lunatic.”

Todd’s itch multiplied tenfold. He could hear his aunt, or someone, laughing at him. He was running through bushes, he was running between legs in a volleyball game. He was tiny.

“This is Ali X. in the morning. All great rock, all the time. Up next, it’s another Elton John classic,” the DJ on the radio said.

The piano introduction of Crocodile Rock started, and Todd was at first comforted. He knew this song. He liked this song. He could feel safe inside this song, for as long as the ride to the police station or to the hamburger station.

After the first verse, the itch seemed to explode. All of a sudden everything inside and on the surface of his skull needed to be scratched. The urge pulsed from all edges of his mind until he felt like that feeling was his purpose.

_“…Well Crocodile Rockin’ is somethin shocking…”_

Screaming in frustration, Todd brought his head forward with all the force he could muster. His flesh met the metal webbing and separated, sending blood and hair to all corners of the squad car. Arby’s screamed, startled and turning to assess the situation with the bloody man in the back.

_“…When your feet just can’t sit still…”_

Todd brought his head back and rocketed it forward again, into the bloody mesh. This time he shook his head back and forth rapidly, metal wires scraping off whatever tissue remained on the top of his skull.

“Don’t!” Arby’s yelled, and Homer shoved his foot down on the gas pedal. The sirens came back on, and Todd’s head was traveling backward again, cocking for another try.

_“…I never knew me a better time and I guess I never will…”_

Arby’s shoved his fingers through the mesh and held them there with wide eyes.

“Stop doing that, you’re going to kill yourself!” He sounded more scared than commanding.

_“…Oh lawdy lawdy those Friday nights!…”_

Todd brought his head forward and broke the cop’s fingers. Arby’s screamed again, this time in agony. He pulled his fingers from the mesh and looked at them stupidly. Homer yanked on the wheel. The police car swerved and began to roll. Then the car imploded, and Todd saw a yellow painted bumper driving through the windshield.

And as time seemed to stop around him, glass from the shattered windows spiraling through the air, the cops’ stupid, uncomprehending faces slashed open, Todd threw his head forward one final time.

The itch fell silent.


The Ghost of St. Frances on Bonaventure


# The Ghost of St. Frances on Bonaventure

The way the overdressed man ran was what caught Vern's attention, how since he was tall, the black bag he carried skipped inches above the crumbling sidewalk. The weight gave him a limp, yet he was able to keep a quick clip in spite of it.

In his twenty years driving through the city in a yellow cab, Vern had seen guys booking it in the Heights before, hoisting spoils with urgency and awkwardness—televisions, armoires, stacks of hubcaps strung together like a day’s catch of fish—but they were never dressed like this. The runner wore a full tuxedo with tails and a ruffled inset, and crimson petals of a handkerchief corsage spilled out of his breast pocket, shining in the mid-afternoon sun. He reminded Vern of the key attendee at a funeral: the one in the box.

Vern pulled up alongside him, taking his foot off the gas and slowing to six miles an hour. He reached and cranked the passenger window open. Vern took in a breath, then expelled it with volume.

“You’re in a weird part of town to be wearing a suit like that, mister! Someone’s liable to make a target of you.”

The running man in the tux looked around, saw Vern, and kept running. After two more strides he slowed, nodding, brows arched above his nose.

Vern stopped the cab.

“Pop the trunk,” the man in the tux said.

Vern pulled the lever under the steering wheel and opened his door, turning to step out.

“I have it, get back in. I don’t have time.”

Tux dropped the bag into the trunk, and slammed the hood shut. He sat behind Vern, running the sleeve of his suit over the ridges of his forehead, pulling away swaths of moisture.

“What you got in that bag?” Vern asked.

“Nothing,” the runner said. He licked his lips. “Honeymoon supplies. Wedding’s today.”

“Oh. Where’s the missus? You didn’t leave her around here, did you? It’d be even worse a bride running around the Heights.”

Tux cleared his throat. “My fiancé is waiting for me at the chapel.”

“Night wedding, huh?”

“If you start driving, we might get there before the sun goes down. I need to be there by seven.”

“I’m on your end, man. What chapel?”

“St. Frances, on Bonaventure.”

Vern nodded, and clicked the fare box on. He put the car in drive and pressed the gas. He made the necessary turns until they were on the way downtown.

“Haunted, supposedly.”

“What’s that?“ Tux was fiddling with his wrist in the backseat. Pale to begin with but his wrist was a purer white, and hairless. _Probably traded in a watch too expensive for its own good_, Vern thought to himself.

“Nothing. Say, what were you doing back there, you had some business in that part of town?“ Vern said, raising an eyebrow into the rear view mirror. His passenger’s head came up, met his reflected gaze, and turned to the window.

“Not really.”

“Well then what? You get taken for a ride by someone else in a yellow car?“ The man offered a rude grunt.

“I did a double take, seeing you jogging up the sidewalk. Thought to myself, there’s a guy who looks like he needs to be somewhere else. Lucky for you I showed up. Don’t you know about the Heights?”

“Lost my car, I guess.” His voice raised this time, cracking in two on the last word, a broken egg of annoyance.

“Lost it? Really? Trade it in for that suit?”

Tux cleared his throat. He unbuckled himself, tugged on his suit pants, and buckled in again. “Look, I don’t want to be rude, but please focus on the road. I get that you’re trying to be friendly, but I’m trying to think.”

“Got it.”

Vern merged onto Bonaventure, eight blocks from the old Catholic Church, St. Frances of Rome. The church was a blocky spire that loomed from his vantage on the street. He figured God had put all the extra space inside it, who cultivated awe with colorful vertiginous windows.

They came to a red light. The fare box read 22.40. The church lay ahead, rising above the strip mall that sprawled across the next two blocks. He looked back. Tux was looking at the church. Dark red splotches had appeared on his cheeks and nose.

“You nervous?”

“No.”

“You want some water?”

“No, can you—would you not ask me anything else? You’ll get your tip, all right?”

The hairs on the back of Vern’s neck went erect, and he bit both of his lips.

“Not the tip I’m worried about. You got a place for a wallet in that tux?”

Tux in the rear-view mirror looked down at himself, then patted his breast pocket.

“Even if I did stiff you, the equipment in the trunk would make up for it.”

“I don’t need honeymoon supplies.”

“You could sell it.”

“Already got a job.”

The light turned green and Vern accelerated for a hundred meters then decelerated for a hundred meters. The church rose above them, God’s shadow blanketing the cab. The man opened his door, and stepped out. He came to the window, holding a twenty and a five. Vern took the bills, still biting both of his lips. Tux pulled another twenty.

“You’ll sit here while I’m inside, wait for us to come out?”

“For twenty bucks? I could get three fares in the time you’re getting hitched.”

Tux smiled, flexing a web of unused muscles. His teeth were dry and white, like stones.

“You’ll sit here?”

Vern wanted to drive off. The bag was still in the trunk. But there had always been rude fares, and twenty bucks might actually be more than he’d get running around, burning gas.

Vern took the twenty.

Tux turned, and Vern leaned over and cranked up the window. He started the air conditioning. He stuffed the money into his wallet. He bit the back of his knuckle and drew blood.

---

Out of the car, Tux, whose real name would be in the paper, kicked his long legs toward the church, head down, meaning to push through the door and make an entrance. He scanned the stains on the sidewalk as he walked and glanced down the street, where the shadow of the church ended and a homeless woman huddled beneath her bedroll in the sun. She was looking at him, and a key of recognition turned some mechanism in his head. He looked down and stepped forward twice, then stopped.

The woman was still looking at him. He walked toward her.

A certainty dropped all the way through him, like a brick down a well: the woman was his fiancé, about double the age and a little worse for wear. Homelessness could do that.

“What are you doing here?” Tux asked.

“It’s my wedding day,” she said. “Our wedding day.”

He knelt down. He didn’t know what to say. His mouth opened, and it opened, and it opened again.

“You probably shouldn’t marry me, you know. I know what happens,” she said.

He closed his eyes. He opened them. She was still his fiancé.

“You know how much I love you?” he said. “I’m here because it has to be me, it can’t be anyone else.”

She put a finger to his lips. “It makes you crazy, the love. On our honeymoon, when I find the hotel manager and you find the both of us, you kill him. You kill everyone in the hotel. I’m in a coma and you’re in prison and that’s married life.”

Tux imagined it. He wanted to say it wasn’t true, that he wasn’t capable. But the bag in the cab knew better. His fiancé knew better. She had always known better, that was the problem.

“We’ll go somewhere else. Go on a different honeymoon.” He was pleading past her now, eager to gain her trust and her compliance, even though she was dead, should have been dead.

“I’ll find anyone," she said to him now, "anyone at all who isn’t you. Because that’s the thing of it all. You love me so much you won’t let yourself imagine that I don’t love you.”

Tux stood up. The blood inside him came to a point behind his eyes, tightened the veins around his skull.

“She loves me. You, I don’t know what you are.”

“We don’t love you.”

The woman under the bedroll shucked it off and stood up. Tux clenched his teeth, flexed every muscle. The woman rocked forward on toes. She put moving lips to his ear, and breathed words.

---

From the cab Vern watched, annoyed. Why had this dingus been in such a hurry to get here only to spend time talking to homeless people? If that’s what he wanted, he could have stayed in the Heights. Vern had been homeless once.

He looked away. He let his eyes glaze over the traffic on Bonaventure, so he could see the way it flowed like water, the people in their cars like droplets, each oblivious of anything but their own destination. Where were they all going?

Tux knocked at the passenger window.

“Pop the trunk,” he said.

Vern pulled the lever under the steering wheel. The trunk popped open. Tux pulled his heavy bag out and made for the church.

“Do you want me to stay here?” Vern yelled, but the window was still up. Tux disappeared into the dark of the church door.

Vern looked around, waiting for the traffic to open so he could pull into it, another droplet joining the flow. But traffic was unrelenting, and he idled, unable to merge. He saw the woman again, the homeless woman, and as she stepped into the shadow of God’s house, her face twisted.

He knew her. She’d lived in the apartment next door, in the Heights. His childhood love. She’d taken a drive-by bullet, and that had been all. He hadn’t cried at her funeral, only later that night, when it occurred to him the box had closed for the last time--she had no way out.

He had no way in.

He watched her now. His heart was a gallon of milk exploding on the floor. His throat choked tears from his eyes, his arm hurt.

Gunfire came from somewhere, a hitching rat-a-tat that shook everything. Vern threw his hands over his ears. Now there were screams. _Oh God. Oh God why are you killing us._

Vern’s dead love turned her head and met his eyes and smiled.


Good Cop


# Good Cop

“Whatcha think’s under all that snow?” Gabe asked his beat partner Mike as he drove. They rolled through Southie, heat blasting in the cruiser. The edges of the windows crackled with ice. It was new dark, temperature falling fast. Snowstorm in progress, with another six inches on the way.

“Bodies. Drunks who didn't get home from the bar,” Mike said, in the Boston way that made the word _bah_. He was looking out the window, at the snow piled between and over cars. "I bet we could open a few cases if we started looking."

“Cases of beer, maybe,” Gabe said. “That’s the only way I’d want to be out there in this. Supposed to get into the negative numbers tonight.”

“You bring up booze a lot, you know that?” Mike said.

Gabe sighed. “I guess I didn’t, though it doesn’t exactly surprise me. You’re right, there are probably bodies. At least one, I imagine. I don’t think that’s the case for us. I’m trying to fry fish.”

Mike looked at him. Gabe sighed again, tapping his fingers on his leg. “God sure took a precipitous dump on us, though, didn't he? A lotta lotta snow. You want to work possible bodies under it all right now?”

“No,” Mike said. “I’m bored is all. Tired of working meatloaf cases. Meatloaf is great, but it's too much meatloaf. Why not a hot pursuit? A car chase? This snowstorm is fattening us up.”

“You, maybe,” Gabe said. “I get my ass to the gym at five in the morning, that's the time to go. Also, good thing we’re not pursuing anyone, the engine floods any time you try to put the pedal down.”

Mike sighed. “Yeah, wish they’d assign us a different car. But the gym, man. I don't understand how you can work a whole day at the police and get up at five."

"Trust me, it's harder to work the whole day at the police than get up early." When Gabe gets to the words _"the police”_ he spits them.

"Insomnia?" Mike asked. "You know, I try with those nature shows when nothing else works. The narrators remind me of my high school math teacher, Mr. Brooks. Some of my sweetest dreams I had in his class. Did hell on my grades though."

They were both silent for a while.

That morning, Gabe woke up minutes before his alarm, heart racing. His wife’s slight snores beside him were the kind of comfort that fed him temporarily. When he got out of bed she groaned and rolled over. He put water on the stove to boil and got in the shower. He felt the beads on his forehead, felt himself leave his body momentarily, then came sucking back inside, polaroids emblazoned on the inside of his eyelids. He shut the water off.

In the kitchen, he poured coffee. He ate slices of melon from a sandwich bag in the fridge. His wife came up behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist. The bump of her belly touched his lower back. He relaxed back into her warmth and softened his expression, turning around.

It was a nice moment. He tried not to think about what the moment would mean if things went awry. Now, in the cruiser, Gabe thought about what he was going to say, how he felt, things he'd been holding inside himself. Things he'd found out.

“We aren't good, Mike,” he said. “We aren't good. People fear us. People who should know we're here for them. They don't trust us. I didn't want to be that. Someone people hate because of things we did. They treat us like we're demons or something. Tired of feeling like that, associating with that.”

“People fear what they don't understand,” Mike said. He fidgeted, looking out the window.

“No, they understand. Power without pity or penalty. We fear _them_, is how it is. We're afraid they won't respect us, that they can't. So they die. And no matter what I do, I can't stop us from killing them. Or...doing other things.” Gabe's voice caught in his throat, the edges of his eyes burned. 

Mike turned to him from the passenger side. “Listen, hey, Gabe. Why are you police?”

That was easy. “To help people and put bad people away.”

“Well, hold on to that. John Q. Public wants us to be murderers and go off on them, go nuts and shoot 'em all. That's what they want. So they can say we're all bad. Then they win. Gotta hold on to why you chose the uniform you in the first place.”

“But the bad people, Mike. They're not out on the street like we're told. They're in here, with us.”

“Maybe in Missouri, but—“

“No, here.” Gabe said. He looked right into Mike’s face. “Now."

Mike looked confused. “Now? It's just you and me here now.”

Gabe looked away, focused on his hands on the steering wheel. Loosened his grip. “You've been a good partner. I always trusted you.”

Mike chuckled. “Me too. Hey, what's this all about? Did I get you mad or something?”

Gabe waited until they were stopped at an intersection. He didn't look Mike in the face.

“I found out some stuff about you. Didn't want to but it was mailed to me. Somebody thought they could force my hand, or get me to act rash.”

Mike paused, taking a breath and swallowing before answering. “What’d you find out, Gabe? “

“Found out you're unfit for the uniform.”

"Me? Gabe, what? You know I’m a brother, that I’d die for this uniform. I bleed blue. I’m a cop, through and through.” Mike laughed nervously at the spontaneous rhyme. 

“I know why you got transferred," Gabe said. "I know about the favors your family pulled for you, and why. I wish I didn’t.”

Mike’s eyes looked like they were going to come out of his face. He doggy paddled for air. “Ah Christ, all that stuff—I mean, I don't know what you found out, but if it's got you mad, maybe—listen, all that was years ago. I've changed. Everything about my life is better, I'm sober, the habit’s gone—“

“Mike. Drugs, alcohol...don't make people do what you did. A little girl called 911 and you showed up and...you did that to someone who trusted you to help. Who'll never trust any of us again. Her mom choked to death while...you did that. Pure evil. Electric chair stuff. And you know? It’s not all I found.”

Mike's eyes were big. Gabe's partner gulped, mouth opening a couple of times, but he couldn't seem to decide what to say. The part of Gabe that still hoped it wasn't true, that someone was set Mike up for a fall, that part of him ceased to exist. 

Now he knew. His partner Mike was the monster the tipster said he was.

“I’m real sorry you found out like that, I bet it feels horrible. Like you don't know who I am or something. But it's still me.”

Gabe's throat was tight. There were tears in the corners of his eyes. When he spoke again his voice was a growl.

“It's you. And I'm sure of exactly who you are.” His heart was starting to race, adrenaline starting to pump.

“Well shit,” Mike said, “this sure is a lot of crying over spilled milk, isn't it? Come on, Gabe. That was me in the past. I'm sorry for what I did, I atoned for it, I changed, I healed.”

“Spilling milk's an accident. She was seven. Give me your sidearm.”

“What? No!”

Gabe drew his gun and pointed it at Mike's head.

“Give me your sidearm or be dead,” Gabe said. “I’ll do it. I searched myself after finding out. I'll do it.”

Mike patted his front and felt down to his side. 

“Slower.”

Mike went slower. “You’re not going to take my sidearm, are you? Come on, Gabe. I'll have to report you for this.”

“Please don’t talk. Give me the radio. And your phone.”

Mike handed over his radio first, unclipped his waist holster and pulled the gun up by the hammer. Gabe took it. 

“Now get out of the cruiser, ”he said.

The color was gone from Mike’s face. His nose was running, he wiped at it slowly.

“Gabe…no. I can’t do that.”

“You’ll do it. You’re a coward.“

Gabe could see Mike begin to protest, to defend himself yet again, before thinking better of it.

“Fine. But only because we're partners and I consider you one of my closest friends, not the barrel trained on my noggin.”

Gabe didn't flinch. "Whatever gets you out of the cruiser.”

“I’m going.” Mike opened the door and a blast of chilly air sucked the heat from the interior. He looked back at Gabe with puppy dog eyes, but Gabe kept the gun pointed at his partner's face.

“Remember we solved that drug bust? Put those junkies in rehab and their dealers away? Remember that? Now those, those were good times.”

“Get out and close the door,” Gabe growled.

Mike sat still for a beat longer, then sighed and got out, leaving the door open a crack. Gabe reached across the passenger seat and yanked the door shut. He locked the cruiser from the inside. He lowered his gun and stared straight ahead, looking at the time. Nine-fifteen.

Outside the car, Mike was talking loud.

“I know how this goes, Gabe. You get me cold, so I'll beg to be let in—then you'll open the back, make me handcuff myself. All fine. But shit’ll hit the fan when you try to bring me in—they'll fire you, you can bet. Probably worse things too. I got seniority on you. And I'm not the only one in the force with skeletons. Far from.“

Gabe turned the radio on, found a station playing a rap song, and pumped the volume. Mike was still talking, his sock puppet mouth opening and closing, but Gabe didn't have to hear it.

The song ended.

Outside, the wind was picking up and snowflakes were starting to fall from the sky. 

Gabe had driven them down West Broadway all the way to a construction yard near D Street. No workers around at this time and even fewer lived in houses around here. The only thing Gabe worried about was another BPD cruiser driving by and seeing them there, Mike standing out in the cold, shouting.

“Gabe, you've made your point. I'll do what you want! Turn myself in. Say fifty Hail Marys. Just let me back.”

As temperatures descended past negative five, then negative ten, time was on Gabe’s side. Mike wasn't a healthy man, and he wasn't well-insulated; only had his police jacket, no gloves. His hands were whiter than usual, almost translucent.

Gabe put the car in drive and pressed slightly on the gas pedal. The cruiser moved forward a car-length and he stopped again.

Another song started on the radio. Gabe thought about what he was doing, the decision he'd made. Thought again about the little girl. Thought about the others, little boys, boys who would grow into men scarred in some deep and terrible way, likely perpetuating the same abuses.

He drove forward another fifteen feet. He glanced in the rear-view mirror. Mike was jogging to the car, shaking his hands out, balling them up and blowing into them.

“Hey, Gabe! Don't leave me here. You're starting to worry me! I don't know what to do, what can I say to make you let me in so that I can explain the rest of it?”

The snow fell harder now. The wind howled. Chains far above in crane equipment clanked in the wind.

“You know what? Fuck this—I'm calling the police myself. I'm calling the police.” Gabe could hear him over the music, now. Mike went for his pockets.

_Shit, his cell phone_. Gabe's heart sped up. _I forgot about the cell phone._ The radio, the gun, that's all he'd thought about. So Mike had no way to hurt him and no way to call the station for backup.

Outside, Mike dropped his cell phone.

Gabe knew he shouldn’t, but couldn’t stop himself. He grabbed his baton and got out of the car.

“Get away from the phone!”

Mike was bending over to pick it up. “Screw you, I’m calling them!”

“No you aren’t.” Gabe kicked Mike in the back, rolling him over his shoulder on the cement. But Mike already had the phone in his hand. Ignoring Gabe's kick, he swiped it open and started to tap.

Gabe swung the baton, hoping to hit the phone, maybe a finger or two. Mike yanked his hands out of the way, then scissored his legs around Gabe's, levering him off balance and onto the ground.

The tables had turned.

“You shouldn’t have gotten out of the cruiser, Gabey.”

_No, this isn’t how this goes._ Gabe’s internal measure kicked on. This was about surviving now, no longer winning. Winning was a lifetime ago.

They were both on the ground, for the moment on equal footing. But his partner was more experienced in hand to hand combat and fought dirty. 

“You lock the door? Bet you didn’t.” Mike is on his feet and rushing to the car faster than it seems like he should be able to move. 

Gabe got up, running to the car, and made it to the door in time for it to be locked, from the inside, by Mike. A wily devilish grin played across his face. Mike leaned forward to the window and yelled, steaming up the glass.

“You didn’t take care of me fast enough, partner. You had your chance, you should have taken it. What’d you do instead? Rush out the car at the first sign of danger. That won’t do. No partner of mine. Hey, you know you and yours are in deep shit now, yeah? Maybe I'll take a drive over, see your digs.”

The keys were still in the ignition. Mike was starting the car, maniacal look on his face. The same face as when he hid behind his badge to hurt children? Before Gabe could move, the cruiser leapt forward, accelerating away into the falling snow.

Gabe was left standing in the cold, alone in a shipping yard, and the advantage he’d so carefully created had evaporated in an instant. 

Waves of anxiety started to wrack Gabe. Had he lost? This quickly? Before he let despair take over, he did a self-check. What did he have on him?

Gabe had his sidearm. His baton. His radio. His cell phone. His wallet. So there was nothing in the car that tied him to it. Who could he radio? Who could he call?

He tried home first, but his wife didn’t pick up. He lived twenty minutes drive from here. if Mark was headed that way, there was likely nothing Gabe could do.

So he called the precinct.

“Dispatch.”

“This is officer Gabe Adelson. I was out on patrol with my partner, but my partner just dropped me off on Broadway. It appears there’s some power outage and I’m going to need a pickup back to the precinct.”

“Who’s your partner?”

“Mike Ruckman.”

“We don’t have any officers in the immediate area, are you good to walk?”

“Depends how far. It’s damned cold.”

“See if you can get to the Animal Hospital near the orange line.”

“At that rate, I’ll take the T.”

“Might be your best option. Other units aren’t nearby, and the closest ones are occupied. Why’d Officer Ruckman drop you off there?”

Gabe breathed in, swallowed, collected himself, and spoke.

“The weird part? About nine-fifteen he became agitated. Spooked. Saw something outside while we were driving or…you know, I don’t even know. But he told me he had to go, that he was going to drop me off and he didn’t want me involved in where he was going. I questioned him, but he stopped the cruiser and told me to get out. He wouldn’t tell me any more. Then I got out of the car and he drove away, heading to the Seaport.”

“Odd.”

“Right.”

“Okay, well, get walking and I’ll send a squad car to intercept. If they don’t see you or you don’t see it, take the Orange line.”

“Ten-four.”

Gabe hung up and started walking back through the empty shipyard toward the street. It was snowing heavily now.

Then, a surprise. Headlights, an engine revving, and the sound of tires searching for purchase on frozen asphalt.

His patrol cruiser was accelerating toward him.

When it was close, Gabe tried to time it, then leaped out of the way. His foot slipped on the ice. The fender grazed his leg.

The car was turning, doing a handbrake one-eighty. Gabe’s brain buzzed with panic. He knew he was getting up but it felt so slow, like in a nightmare.

The car was accelerating toward him again, and Gabe was on his feet. He bent his legs and started one way, then another, trying his best to zigzag. The car was behind him. Gabe could hear the car more over his left shoulder so he turned violently back to his right and sprinted from a turn on his right heel.

The cruiser’s tires squealed on the pavement, close, but not as close as the first time.

Gabe looked, he was behind the cruiser. He could see Mike inside, slamming his hands against the steering wheel. The car was stopped, the engine was off again.

Did he yank the key out on accident? No. _The engine flooded._

Gabe pulled his sidearm, put it up to the window, and tapped the glass. Mike glanced at him, shrugged, and tried to start the car. The cruiser’s engine came to life. Gabe no longer scared him. Gabe was in the rear-view mirror of Mike’s mind.

If Gabe hadn’t already decided on Mike’s end, this would have been the moment that sunk him. He’d have let his partner get away. Instead, Gabe racked the slide and pulled the trigger.

PLOCK! PLOCK!

Holes appeared in the window just as the engine started to rev. 

Mike turned to look at him, with what was left of his face.

He tried to talk, maybe say “I didn’t think you’d do it,” but what came out was slurry mishmash due to lack of jaw and a disintegrated tongue. Mike swiped at him with his hands at the window, but the driver’s side window hadn’t shattered, only been perforated. His limp hands met the window and slid harmlessly off.

Gabe stepped back, still holding the gun, still trained on his partner’s skull.

Mike’s body seemed to crumple forward, over the steering wheel, and the cruiser’s horn blared.

The cruiser started inching forward, accelerating slowly toward the pier. Then faster, faster. As it neared the water’s edge the cruiser swerved, as though Mike had resurrected himself for one last attempt at course correction. The momentum was too much, however. The cruiser hit one of the barrier poles sideways and flipped up, so that Gabe could see its underbelly, the fuel tank and all four tires. Then it was over the edge, splashing into the water.

The snow came down almost too thick to see that far. 

He’d have to walk from here, now that the car was in the drink. Mentally he knew it was fifteen below zero, but he felt warm. His heart, which only moments before had been pumping blood through his neck and chest and skull rapidly, was beating steadily again. 

Like that, it was over.

Later, if anyone managed to dredge up the car, they’d wonder how Mike shot himself in the left side of the face and still put bullet holes through the driver’s side window. Maybe they’d assume he was murdered. Maybe they wouldn’t. 

Gabe didn’t care.

He walked, knowing he’d done something the police, and the system that created and relied on them so seldom achieved. He’d put something right.

Snowflakes landed on his hair and his ears, freezing against his skin. He didn’t notice. His breath was hot and he walked through it, but he didn’t notice. 

He was thinking about what Mike had said, begging to keep his gun. 

>“I’m not the only one in the force with skeletons. Far from.”

“I know about them, too, Mike, and I’m coming. It’s long past time.”


Hair


# Hair

It took a whole minute of staring in the mirror for real estate agent Matt Garvey to realize he was no longer bald.

“You did it. You dog, you really did it!” He danced in his underwear around the toilet, cradling to his chest a bottle of pills, newly-opened. This one was called Regrowacil.

He picked up the phone to call his ex-wife Jodi, who’d always shamed him for his obsessive search for the right hair product.

“My salon guy swears by it,” he’d say, about some new cream.

“Your salon guy needs to sell you _something_, it’s not like you’re getting a haircut.” Jodi always knew what to say.

Garvey got her message machine and thought about doing a wacky voice--but she would just think he was drunk. He hung up without leaving a message and got a beer from the fridge to celebrate. He’d save the wacky voice for if he actually did get drunk.

He popped open the beer and turned on the news. What he saw made him hollow with despair.

The normally bald television anchor was wide-eyed below a bushy mullet and talking fast. ”-rates are doubling, tripling all around the world! Everyone’s affected, nobody knows what it means or when it’ll end! I’ll stay with you, folks, but know that this reporter’s head grows heavier with each passing moment.”

The chyron at the bottom of the screen read "Hair Growth Epidemic - What Does it Mean?"

Garvey barked a curse and threw his beer across the room. Then he went to get another one.

An hour later he walked to the bank, tipsy. It was a nice day, the first in almost three months, but he was jaded. What had seemed like a blessing at first had just been a collective curse. The sponge on his head grew heavier, itchier, and when he scratched it sweat poured down his face. “Put me in the chair now,” he thought out loud. “I’m ready.”

He didn’t mean it. He was pissed. He'd been on top for a moment, only to find he was really at the bottom with everyone else. He had an idea.

The people on the street were all hippies. Grizzly Adams and his fifty twin brothers passed him, most with fingers plunged greedily into the thick of their beards, tugging, as the hair on their heads pushed itself out like play-doh in a squeezer.

At the bank, the sight was even stranger. Men in suits looked like lead singers, like surfer bums, like samurai. Some of them were getting it in their heads to tie the mess up with rope, but the knot would sink with new growth and ten minutes later it had to happen all over again.

“Everything in my checking and savings, please. Cash.”

The acne kid at the window swam through his beard to complete the transaction.

Garvey kept the news on at home, and the panic they were selling gave him an idea. He used his own old scissors to chop his floor-length brillo off and drove across town to the Buy It All and bought their stock of scissors and hair trimmers. Then he leased one of his own real estate properties, a little storefront between a used bookstore and a sushi restaurant.

On Monday, after a whirlwind of work, he opened his makeshift barber shop to the public.

In twenty minutes there was a line out the door, and the only thing stopping Garvey from being rich was the speed at which he could shear.

He’d gotten ahead of the crisis, and gotten a head of hair out of the deal as well. He thought of phoning Jodi just to rub it in, but she was probably dealing with her own hair.

A month later the sun was out all the time. No nighttime, like Alaska in the summer, only this was Pittsburgh. Hair grew twice-as-fast as the thrice-as-fast it had before. It grew on dead people too, and detectives were solving murders left and right, as tendrils and tufts led investigators down wells and through sewers to every previously missing body.

_Habeus_ too many _corpus_, Garvey remembered thinking when he saw this on the news, and nowhere to put them.

Hair on skulls grew so voluminous and fast, strands escaped the coffins and dug up cemeteries from the inside, creeping their way to and through the surface like some species of morbid daisy. Groundskeepers with weed-whackers went at the growth with gusto, but more than one cemetery employee got his own hair caught in the hungry buzzing machines and met an end that way. Finally the hair was left alone, and cemeteries became hairy plains, each grave a hill of hair, sprouting from the skulls beneath the headstones.

It was scary times, but Matt Garvey could only worry about himself, and sometimes Jodi, when he thought of her.

Every morning Garvey woke up in a new blanket of Irish scruff, and had to cut it off with the heaviest-duty pair of scissors he still had, a rubber-gripped spring-loaded gnashing-tearing-shearing contraption he’d special ordered from the internet.

One morning, as he pulled together the last lock and cut, the scissors broke apart and fell, joining their bisected brothers among the shaggy carpet made of past follicles. He picked up the morning’s pile and walked with it bundled in his arms to the road, where he dumped it into the trash.

An elderly neighbor was doing the same in her own driveway when one of the flimsier trash bins down the road got a gust of wind and went end-up, spilling a threaded mass of blond strands of hair ten meters long into the avenue. It swirled there like cotton candy until it formed a sort of great albino tumbleweed and began to make its way toward them, picking up swaths of hair on its way.

His neighbor just stood there, bag of hair in hand, unable to move. Garvey knocked her out of the way just as the killer hairball passed. It ran a red light and knocked into a black sports utility vehicle in the intersection.

The SUV rocked on two wheels then came back down, accelerating forward unharmed.

Garvey breathed a sigh of relief, right as a man driving a convertible intercepted the hair blob head-on and was propelled upward, spinning. All Garvey could see of the driver was his hair, a bright orange flag that caught on the traffic signal sign and ripped the poor man’s head off.

His neighbor got up, brushed herself off, put her hands over her face and walked backwards back into her house without saying a thing to Garvey.

Things were getting out of control.

Two months after the hair had started to grow, nobody drove anywhere. Garvey had already sold his car to buy scissors, but he had a bike. It felt a lot better to have a bike and not be able to ride it than it would to have a car and not be able to drive it. You couldn’t, because there weren’t roads anymore.

There was only hair. Scratchy, velvety, fine, voluminous, pubic, nose and ear, beard and back hair. Living and dead hair, cat and dog hair.

The sun was out every day, warming the everywhere piles, and the bodies of the homeless stank through, gurbling burps of putrid sweet that attracted flies and beetles. Vehicles didn’t run anymore. There was hair in the engines, tied around the axles, pinning tires to their chassies. The internet was choked off, and soon the news didn’t play anymore either. Before long the only source of insight Garvey had was his own thoughts.

He weathered it well, running his barber shop during the day and at night tinkering in the basement with tools, making a better scissor.

He was _inventing_.

He fed his hair through guide-loops into a bucket of acid in another room, so he didn’t breathe the fumes except for when he was replacing the solution (it got diluted with hair after about an hour).

Acid was only the latest solution - before this, he’d used his own hair to power the whole house, by feeding it into the furnace and treating it like a steam engine. But he ran into an issue: burning hair at such a large scale bothered the neighbors. They waded over, one after the other, demanding he stop.

The dark-haired woman he’d saved told him he was single-handedly destroying the rest of the ozone layer.

“Besides,” she said with a finger in his face, “it smells worse than that guy who was coming around asking for food last week.”

That guy was dead and buried under a bed of hair in the woman’s front yard. She hadn’t fed him, and he’d died. To Garvey, this was quite poor behavior, and he'd have called the cops on her if the cell towers still worked, if the police still patrolled.

He told her he'd try to do better. After she left he resolved to burn hair in smaller batches while he worked on his scissors. He almost a new pair ready by then.

These were double-jointed, so as to collect and deliver a strong pinch with minimal effort, so even the weakest child could chop through the thickest braid. They were notched, designed to pull strands into evenly-spaced cutting troughs and neatly slice through.

_Everlasting shears_ he thought of calling them.

He went through bad periods too. Often the sheer futility of it all got him in a bad mood and there was no beer. He’d have to barter for some.

He neutralized the rest of his acid and dumped it down the sink.

By the third month, barber was the only occupation worth having, and Garvey was the only barber worth going to. He’d constructed an empire around his “everlasting” shears, become the most important man in the state, in the time zone.

People needed him.

He kept the design of the shears to himself, and hired a team of barbers to shear the unwashed masses as they approached. They dropped to their knees and prayed to him, and their hair was hauled off and dumped into lakes of acid. People came from all around, wading through hair for hundreds of miles, eating nothing but flies and beetles.

When the reached Garvey’s kingdom and felt how his shears could take the weight off their shoulders, they worshipped him.

At six months, he released the design of the shears and mass-marketed them across the country, across the world.They wrote songs about him and stamped his face on money.

Garvey sat on his throne and smiled, sipping beer, thinking of Jodi and what she’d say now. He'd call her, see if she'd survived, but that wasn't an option. Anyway, what did he care? His hair was constantly tended to, shorn away by a beautiful naked woman whose own hair was likewise constantly tended and shorn away by more beautiful naked women and so on and so on. It was too good to be true. It might never end.

Garvey had it all figured out.

A few minutes later clouds came and covered the sun and the hair stopped growing.

Garvey looked up from his beer. His eye twitched.

It was starting to rain.

It fell hard and heavy and all at once, and it burned. A drop of it got near his left eye and before long he couldn’t see out of that eye anymore.

Acid from the sky.

Everyone did their best to run in the sloshy clingy hair, trying to guard themselves from the acid rain. Each drop as it hit Garvey felt cold, then hot, then itchy. It ate through hair, it ate through skin.

There was no time for Garvey to think a way out of it, but there was pain, and there were screams.

It was the rain that ended the reign of Garvey and the surface people, and it is recorded here.


Heartache


# Heartache

Chilled afternoon, gray like the sky and the falling rain. People wrapped in newspaper go by half-sprinting, and others scuffle along huddled beneath large umbrellas. Maureen, the hairstylist, is as gray as the day. Her pale blonde hair is matted against the sides of her face, and she slumps against the faded red brick walls of the building’s back porch. A cigarette smolders in her grim-lipped mouth, and sizzles each time a droplet finds the cherry, threatening to go out. Maureen doesn't seem to notice—her eyes float in their sockets, lacking focus, idly staring at nothing whatsoever.

Maureen had not moved for some time. Already her clothes were soaking through, and perhaps even if it began to hail she'd remain, with her dying cigarette and her far-off eyes, oblivious. The door to the back porch opens.

“Your smoke break was finished with ten minutes ago!”

Maureen starts, and through the everywhere curtain of water sees her boss, Trinka, hands on hips and eyes narrowed.

“You’re soaked, Maureen! And we have customers to deal with! Inside, inside!”

The wet hairstylist nods and flicks her cigarette, turning wordlessly to the door and stepping inside.

“Get yourself cleaned up now, I can’t have you cutting hair like this. Use the bathroom.”

Maureen nods again, and moves toward the bathroom.

“Not there, not there, can’t you see that’s my only good rug? Go around!” Maureen looks to the back door and twitches, as if she means to run for it, but after a moment her eyes stop darting and she steps aside, tottering along on the linoleum instead. She reaches the bathroom door and steps over the rug, sighing.

“Clean up all the water on the floor, too. And don’t be long in there, Maureen, I’m not paying you to mope around. What’s the matter with you, anyhow?”

In the doorway, Maureen turns. “My husband. Left me for another woman. Monday.” But Trinka hadn’t waited around for an answer, had waddled back into the showroom and Maureen hears her addressing a customer. Her voice is high, tittering with too much zeal.

Maureen towels her hair, wrings her clothes. Another ten minutes and she is holding an old woman’s dark hair in her hands, shearing it slowly and without much precision. Her mind is somewhere else.

“Girl, I have somewhere to be in twenty minutes,” the old woman says, clicking her tongue. Maureen’s eyes refocus, and her snips quicken. “I’m sorry. I must be a little off today.”

“Got something on your mind, have you?”

“Hmm? Yes, I suppose I do. My husband left me for another woman. Can you believe? Just this Monday.”

The old woman blinks, and sniffs, adjusting herself in the seat as she rolls her head further back. “Oh. Well, you’ll get over it. Happens to everyone.”

“I got home from work and all of his things were just-”

“You know, I think I might want highlights. All of the younger women are doing that nowadays. I could look decades younger.”

---

Maureen’s car idles in front of her home. She glances at it. Too empty, she thinks, and makes a decision. Her friend Rita, a sorority mate from university. She lives in the city, and Maureen will visit. Drop by anytime, hadn't she said that? Yes, Maureen thinks so. Rita will listen, will understand. This, or the absence of her husband in the house they had bought together. Maureen dashes inside to write down the address and is off again just as soon.

The door opens and Rita is standing there with her mouth shaped like a Q and with eyes that don’t quite register what they see. She is wearing a black sequined dress and pearls around her neck, her hair poised above her head like a nest of serpents ready to uncoil.

“Oh. Dear Lord. Muh...Maureen? Is that you? Oh! I haven’t seen you in - well, since.” The woman clears her throat. “Come in, don’t stand out there. I’ve missed you, what’s the occasion?”

“I came by because. I needed a friend, I needed to not be alone.”

“Oh? How unfortunate.”

“I was hoping we’d be able to talk.”

Rita clicks her tongue. “Ooh. It’s not the best of times. Peter and I were just getting ready to leave for a dinner party. I would invite you but, well, you just couldn’t show up looking like that. You’d have to change, and by then...”

Maureen looks around. There's a couch in the living room, but Rita hadn't asked her to sit.

“Oh, of course, Rita. I should have called. And thank you about the dinner party, but it’s best if I don’t go, anyway. I have things to do at home.” The thought of home chills her, the place is no longer one of love. “I’m sorry for intruding.” A man’s voice calls from the other room.

“Rita, I can’t find those cuff links you bought me, have you put them somewhere?”

A man walks through a hallway door. “Oh.”

“Peter, this is Maureen. One of my oldest friends. From college. Maureen, this is my husband.”

“Hello.” Maureen nods. Peter tips his head forward to look at her over the tops of his glasses. “Hello. You look...are you all right?

“She’s fine, Peter, she just came to say hi. We don’t have time, I told her we’re on our way to a dinner party.”

Peter waves his hand. “Nonsense. You haven’t seen Maureen since college? Talk! The dinner party doesn’t start for another forty minutes anyhow. And between you and me,” he winks at Maureen, “If you knew about the dinner parties Rita has dragged me to you’d know how much I hate being early, or even on time.”

“But Peter,”

“Sit. Talk.” He smiles at Maureen and walks back into the bedroom. Rita regards Maureen politely and touches the ring of pearls around her neck. “So. Come into the kitchen. I don’t see why we can’t sit for a minute.”

“Okay.”

The kitchen table is wiped clean, an angelic pair of salt and pepper shakers smiling widely. Maureen looks at her lap. Rita licks her lip and Maureen thinks for the first time, Maybe I shouldn’t have come, I’m inconveniencing her. She doesn’t even want me here.

“My husband. He left me a note. Monday and he was gone, he took all of his clothes, his things. He said it was another woman, he said.” Her lips tremble but she does not cry. “He never said goodbye and he was my.” She doesn’t say it. “When I found him I was done looking. It’s not true, they say it’s not true, that love is a myth and it’s all just. But now that he’s gone it’s like he’s dead.”

Maureen looks to see the effect of her words, but sees none. Rita is drumming her fingers on the table.

“Monday. It happened Monday,” Maureen says. It's all she knows for certain.

“Yes, well.” Another sigh from the other woman. “You know, my dear, it was bound to happen, of course. I was there when you were married, you remember. I told you then that he would never be able to stay faithful. That it was only a matter of time.” She leans in, whisper-ing, “And there is no changing the fact that he probably wished he had married someone more...well, Maureen, you were never the most beautiful girl in the room.”

“He wrote me a note. In the note it said he loved me.”

“Of course it did. Do you know why he left? Was there someone else? How was the sex? Men only know one thing. Was that it? If you can’t please your man in the bedroom, you can’t expect him to stay with you.”

Maureen’s throat closes up and she begins to wonder what she’ll do when she leaves here, when she finds herself back in her car, alone.

“No, I...I suppose that might have been it.”

“There you are then. I wouldn’t be so upset about it, it was going to happen. You know that. You saw it coming, didn’t you?”  Maureen’s eyes close. She saw no such thing. She can’t think straight. “He was gone when I got home, he was gone and the note and he never said goodbye and I don’t know how I’m going to—”

“Yes, yes. It’s a bad situation.” Rita was standing up. “But I really must, I mean, Peter and I really must be going. The dinner party isn’t going to wait for us, you know.”

“Oh. Of course. Thank you for listening.”

Rita comes forth with a wide grin and an arm that wraps around Maureen’s shoulder like a snake. ”Of course, Maureen. You’ve always been a dear, dear friend.”

She’s ushered to the door. “Thanks again,” she says, as the door shuts. From inside, she hears, “Peter!”

In the car on the way home Maureen tries not to think. Being alone is even worse at this point than being told to consider the possibility that it was her fault her husband had left her. It hadn’t been, had it? She had loved him as hard as she’d been able. Still did, in fact. If she gets home and he is there waiting for her, asking for forgiveness she'll give it. Even if he isn't asking for it. She’ll even vow to never throw it in his face during an argument. The thought spurs her on, drives her foot into the gas pedal as her car speeds up. The night air whistles past the tiny crack in her driver’s side window and she turns up the radio, the drone of some call-in advice show filling her ears but not her head. Her head is filled with thoughts of her husband. _He's home._ She can feel it. _He'll be there, waiting for me._ His car parked on the road. It's almost certainty at this point, and she can’t bear to think how she'll feel if she's wrong.

But the spot is empty. What Maureen feels is disbelief.

---

At work the next day her eyes are hot and red from lost sleep. She cuts hair, and she can see in their faces that she’s not there; that she’s not human to them. Just a necessary thing. A cashier at the head of a check-out lane. But she keeps catching her mouth opening, her words spilling out. “My husband.” She needs to talk - it's like her need to drink, or urinate. Soon it will be four days since her husband left  and she still hasn't talked about it properly. She ought to mention how he'd whispered in the dark how he couldn’t believe he’d gotten so lucky, how she’d been unable to stop smiling, even when he couldn’t see. She ought to say just what the letter had said, word for word, and how she’d fallen to the ground clutching her heart, screaming for him in case it had been some sick joke. Her listener would hold her hand, sigh and nod in all the right places. Maureen would tell, and her listener’s eyes would grow dark and tearful, and she’d hear how sorry they were.

Two more customers come in, and Maureen’s hand is itching for a cigarette. She notices one of them, a man.

“Maureen. Hello," the man says. "You remember me from yesterday, don’t you?”

“Peter. Yes.”

He climbs into her chair and smiles at her.

“Guess today was my day for a haircut.” Then, furrowing his brow, “Are you all right? You look terrible.”

She giggles. “I’m going insane. My husband left me. I can’t-”

”Your husband left you?” he takes her hand. “How horrible.”

She closes her eyes and can feel it coming, a waterfall of sorrow, dropping words onto her tongue. “I don’t want to be a bother. It was Monday.”

“No, no. I want to hear.” He looks into her eyes and Maureen is dizzy with relief.

Peter's face is a mask of concern. He sits, waiting.

Maureen is carried away and tells him everything.


HEUQB5

Hide and Seek


# Hide and Seek

My brain flickered on, a fluorescent bulb somehow intact.

Pain came, waves of it, throbbing from every joint and muscle, explosions of nerves firing off warning signals. _Get away, get somewhere safe_, but the warning came too late. I struggled to open my eyes, swollen shut, the ringing buzz in my busted eardrums giving way to the sounds of motors, muffled voices, and a slow creak. It was cold.

I was outside. I needed help.

I got my right eye open, then the left, seeing only a blurry dark. I was piled against a wall in an alley. Numbly I looked into the black fog until it began to clear, noticing subtle movement down the alley. As my eyes adjusted to the ambient light I connected the slow creak to a man with a funny hat pulling a wagon. The wagon was filled with boxes. The funny hat man turned his head my way, and I saw the yellow glint of his eyes for a moment before he disappeared into the dark.

I sat there, and I closed my eyes again. After maybe five minutes I managed to pull myself to my feet, swaying in place until I tried to lift my left foot.  Instead of taking a step, I fell sideways into a stack of crates. They went over and I went with them, gasping and rolling in the gravel like I was wrapped in carpet. I was bound somehow, and there was a new pain in my right ear. I touched it, or whatever the ear was now - taught and long, pulled like taffy and tied to a familiar tightly-woven elastic fabric.

My suspenders. Which meant whatever happened to me, I had either been coming home from work or on my way there. I couldn’t remember.

From my ear, the suspender lassoed my head three times, cutting into the skin in my cheeks and forehead like cheese under thin wire, and ran from my neck down my back and up through my legs, where it had been clinched it to the zipper of my patchwork pants.

The other suspender was a tourniquet around my left thigh, slicing into the back of my right knee before winding its way up my back and tangling in my hair. My oversized red work shoes had been severed at the midpoint, as well as my socks, and my toes protruded, unhurt but purple. A red foam ball that should have been glued to my face was instead stuffed between my toes.

I was a mess.

"You remember me?"

A voice in the night. I twisted my head all around and saw nothing but shadows.

The shadows moved, and I did half-remember something. Something terrible.

"Oh dear," I said, and then I was lifted from the rubble by a huge hand that bunched the front of my suit in a massive ball of fabric, skin and hair. I dangled several feet off the ground, the hand pulling me face to face with my tormentor.  The creature seemed to breathe, and I expected a smell - but air only went in.

"Did I mention? Great show - I laughed, I cried.”
Its voice, low and raspy, came from a dark hollow.

"Can you laugh? Laugh for me."

A neon EXIT sign across the street flickered on, bright red tracing the night.

Features of my attacker started to come out - relief in a world of gray flatness, and though I saw clearly for the first time, I couldn't comprehend what I was seeing. With each flicker of light his image was stamped into the night like a Super 8 film playing ultra slow.

Its face was still hidden, but the thing it wore on its head I'll never forget.

A menagerie of gears, pulleys, hinges and all manner of mechanical ornamentation balanced there. It was a hat of sorts, a cone of living, steaming complexity. A tiny metal man in a tiny metal cart emerged from a hole and rode a thin rail around the headgear and back in, tiny arms raised in anticipation of some hidden drop. Inside the machine I heard the sound of gears grinding and then a shrill drilling noise that rattled the nerves in my teeth, followed by a puff of steam from the hole.
I imagined the tiny metal man had just met its maker.
Below the steam machine was the wide brim of the thing’s hat, quarter of an inch thick and curved up at the sides. It wore black robes inlaid with silver designs I would never be able to reproduce, and patterns I've never seen before or since were layered throughout the material with theatrical flair, as though the thing had stepped from the stage of some cosmic opera just moments before.

Finally the neon sign brightened and steadied, and the black hole under the hat let out a phlegm-coated gurgle that could have been a sigh.The corner of its mouth spread and oyster yellow teeth gleamed.

"Make it snappy, Boppo. The show must go on."
I tried to laugh, but it came out in wheezes.

“Heh-oh, heh-oh.”

Then, as though I were a bag of bread under his arm, he walked me out of the alley and down the empty street to a light pole. He hung me by my collar on the sort of hooks they use for stringing rope for parade day. My feet still dangled several feet off the ground but now I finally had a clear view of him.

It may have been a monster, it may have been a demon. It most certainly wasn’t a man.

His face was concealed by an iron mask, gunmetal blue and riveted there like buttons on some ornate riding saddle. Where his eyes would have been were vertical slits cut into the iron, and the mouth was a completely separate construction, lips blue and floating independent of all else. Its long nose was scooped and chiseled to a point like the edge of a knife. As quick as I could take it all in, the mask spun away and I was looking at another face, white this time and spider-web cracked, a shiny Victorian porcelain. The thing’s new face had a dark orange patch over the right eye, rust-colored nose and full lips.

I opened my mouth.

"Stop. Before you make another sound, let's have a look at what's behind door number three."

The second mask spun off and I was looking at yet another face, this one flesh that had been carved into and inked in such great detail that I couldn’t tell what the original color had been. Dark blue spirals intersected with patches of line-work and dot patterns, bright white arrows and astronomical hieroglyphics - the moon at waxing gibbous, stars going nova and rings wrapping planets. The red concentric circles on his dart-board chin accented the deep red of his nose and his lips were black with white glowing dots.

It was this face that again curled a lip and posed those pearly yellows.

"That's all I have for you tonight, kiddies. Remember, next show is at seven, same place. Dress warm, and bring a friend."

The light went out and a hot puff of fetid air blasted me full in the face and I was left alone, swinging on that light pole, waiting for morning or for some kind passerby to find me and cut me down, just a busted-open clown piñata, hanging in the night.

---

It's been years since that encounter, and yet I can't keep from thinking of it every now and then. Every squirt of water from my breast pocket daisy, every manufactured trip over my size- twenty shoes, every snap of my suspenders to let out a fart reminds me of my time with that other, darker thing.
And when a parent asks me when I'll do the act again, with the balloon animals, and the pies I juggle before catching each, with practiced clumsiness, on my face, when this jolly dad asks will I do it again after the children have eaten and the sun has gone down and the parents are drunk, will I do it just for them if they pay me double, I have to say:

"I'm sorry sir, but the seven-o-clock show has been permanently canceled."


Hole Sale


# Hole Sale

When I came upon the For Sale By Owner sign in the middle of the forest, I thought someone had played a joke. It wasn’t propped up against a tree or next to a rock or any other significant landmark. Someone’s house was no longer for sale. I skipped toward it, wanting to pick it up, turn it over. Take it with me so that when I got home I could tell Sheila and use it as a prop for my recounting. “Right there, in the middle of it all, someone left this sign,” I imagined myself saying. “As if the world itself were up for grabs.”

I was so occupied with the sign that I almost fell in.

It was a hole in the ground, right in front of the sign. Covered from distance by the growth of ferns and yellow saw grass. As big in diameter as a basketball player, and dark. I hadn’t even meant to stop, wouldn’t have, except some instinct locked my muscles and jerked my body to a halt. I stood there, aghast. Looking into it made me dizzy.

I remembered being a boy and sticking my head down the well behind my country house, dropping stones to see how long it would take for each PLUNK to reach me. I was fascinated with holes as a boy and even now I had the urge to chuck some unsuspecting slab of limestone down this one's belly.

I got on my own belly and inched forward, the way I had in Flagstaff, at the canyon. My whole head and neck were dangling over the hole and even though my body anchored me on solid ground, hands wrapped in tall grass like handles, it felt as though I were about to fall. I could see maybe twenty or thirty feet into the hole before it got too dark to make out the edges anymore. I whispered to myself, building up the courage to let loose a yell into the chasm, and when I did it there wasn’t an echo. I yelled again, and then stopped, nervous. There had to be an echo, hadn’t there? Nausea started in on my guts and I had to roll over and look at the sky. Then I looked at the For Sale sign again.

Did it belong to the hole? It was close enough - closer than it was to any of the other things in the immediate landscape. But who would be selling a hole? Who would even bother to claim a hole in the first place? I knew the answer to that second one - I would. When I was nine I’d dug my own hole near the bike path in my backyard, big enough around for me to sit in and deep enough so my head would only barely emerge if I stood my full height. I’d tried to con my cousins into paying to see a bottomless pit, not much, just a few nickels each. They’d been suspicious, but my aunts and uncles humored me, dropping coins into my soiled hands and pretending to be impressed. I’d had a fantasy about a bottomless pit since I was even younger than that, imagining that if I jumped into one I’d fall so long that falling became unremarkable. I’d die of thirst before I ever hit any bottom.

I sat up and pondered at the sign. There was a phone number on the bottom of it, written neatly in black marker. I had my phone.

“Hello?” a man said on the third ring.

“Hi. I’m calling about your…hole for sale?”

“Oh. Wonderful. Are you there now?”

“Yeah. Sitting by it.”

“Can you stay? I’ll be along as soon as I can.”

“Sure, I guess. How far do you have to—”

He’d hung up.

_Good one, Elliot. What if the guy lives in the city? What if he commutes? You just committed to staying by this hole indefinitely._ It was almost romantic. The hole and I had just met and here I was, prepared to give it hours of company. As it turned out, I only had to wait five minutes.

He came from behind me, silently.

“Hello.”

I jumped when he spoke, which scared me twice as much because my legs were dangling over the edge. I turned around, sheepish. He was a tall man, at least seven feet, but slight, and the dark clothes he wore bagged around him like curtains. He wore old glasses, lenses milked and frames made of wire. His translucent gray hair and the wrinkles on his waxy face made me think of my grandfather in the casket. He smiled at me.

“Oh. Hi.”

“She doesn’t like when you sit like that. Gets her excited.”

He gestured to the hole. I took my legs out. He laughed.

“My little joke.”

“Right.” I got to my feet, and he held out a hand that could have palmed a pumpkin. Shaking it was like being a kid again, and he did have that feeling about him. Like this man would make anyone who came near him feel not only small, but young. Foolish.

“Elliot,” I said, and the man nodded. He didn’t give his name.

“So you’re here because you’d like to purchase the hole.” He eyed me, like he was trying to figure if I was worthy of owning one.

“Maybe I’d like to. I don’t know much about it. As a prospective buyer I might have a few questions. How much is it worth? Does it have any special history, or a name? Have you had it appraised recently? Finally, is there any structural or water damage I should worry about?”

The old man smiled big. “Let’s start with the water damage.”

“Okay.”

“Nine summers ago I sat out here with a hose I had snaked from my home. More than a mile of hose. I pumped out an entire pond’s worth of water, seeing if I could fill it up. Couldn’t. Didn’t get any fuller than it is right now. Structurally, she’s about as sound as a hole is going to get. Most empty parts in the ground are caves, or are dug out like mines, and those all have structural problems. Cave-ins. But here, look. This hole just goes straight down. What’s going to cave in?”

“You’re a natural born hole salesman.”

“Or I would be, if I’d ever sold a hole before. Mostly I consider myself a poet. Now listen, I can’t address your appraisal question, because I’m not familiar with real estate. Never dealt with any of those house people. But this hole has a history, sure. Been with my family for a long time. My uncle died and left it to my brother and I when we were sixteen. Used to be kind of an obsession with us. We’d come out here and camp by it on weekends. The next summer my brother got into some trouble and ran away. The police were on him, and he would have gone straight off to prison. They never found him. I came out here a week after he’d gone and found one of his shoes right on the edge. In the shoe was a little note for me.”

“He jumped in?”

The old man nodded. “I was under the impression this was a kind of special hole, the kind that doesn’t stop. So I figured he might still be alive. I spent the next four days on my chest, yelling down the hole that I loved him and that I knew he was all right. But Mister Elliot, that was seventy years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to be. I’ve made peace with her since then. I feed her things, sometimes.”

For a second, I thought he meant me. _Way to be, Elliot. The crazy old man is going to push you in. A sacrifice to the hole god._ He didn’t make a move toward me, but I put my left foot behind my right to brace myself if he tried anything. How many dead things were at the bottom? I guessed a lot.

What sort of things?”

He waved his hand. “Chairs, desks. Televisions. Once a piano, and that time I was sure I’d hear it hit, explode in a symphony of taught strings set loose, keys dancing against her walls. But no. I mentioned my poetry, didn’t I? She’s the only one who's ever read it. I fill a wastepaper basket with crumpled bits of verse, douse it in butane, and just before I tip it, I light a match. That’s when I can see the furthest into her. Until the light is just a winking in the distance, like a satellite in the night sky. Over the years I’ve probably filled her with a landfill’s worth of odds and ends. Of course, filling is most likely the wrong word.”

I wasn’t sure how much of this I believed.

“Did you name it?”

He shook his head. “Not me. I don’t know who did. But her name is Lenore.”

“Oh.” It explained the way he spoke of the hole like it was some old ship, or stranger, an actual woman. I puffed out my chest.

“Well, sir. I’m impressed. I’ve never seen such a hole, and I’m sure it’s the only one like it. I can’t imagine how much you’d be selling it for.”

The old man started chewing his cuticles. “What would you do with her?”

I hadn’t thought of it. I hadn’t even decided I wanted the hole, but something in the back of my mind knew that if the price was anything I could pay, that I would do my best. It was Sunday afternoon, I was at probably the end of my hike, and at the moment nothing seemed more important than owning this hole.

“I don't know. Maybe rappelling. Rock climbing. Bungee-jumping, even? Try to get to the bottom and come back up.”

He nodded. “I would sell it for something small. Do you have…a bottle of water and a flashlight?”

I did. I passed him my CamelBak and a small LED flashlight I dug out of my pack. He traded me a piece of folded paper from his back pocket. He pointed to several lines, and I signed them. Then he signed a line, and I put the paper in my pack. Lenore was mine. I dialed Sheila. She either wasn't going to believe it, or she wasn't going to care.

The old man looked at me, wistful.

“You won’t get to the bottom. None of us will. But we’ll make the best of the journey.”

He went to the edge of the hole and looked down into it. The water bottle was strapped to his back, the straw in his mouth. He clicked on the flashlight and looked back at me, winking. Then, before I could move, he pitched forward and disappeared.

“SEVENTY YEARS,” I could hear him yelling to his brother,

“SEVENTY YEARS' HEAD START!”


Insider Trading


# Insider Trading

I kind of don’t believe this is happening. I’m at the hospital downtown, the big one, I’m wearing a backless gown, and I’m sitting upright in my fourth waiting room of the day. I’m here instead of my job interview because my car wouldn’t take me anywhere else. Something urgent in my chart, or at least that’s what I’m guessing. I’m a little mad I missed my interview but I’m more scared of what I’m here for.

I feel fine but everyone is really not acting normal. After a few minutes alone during which I nervously bite the skin off my thumbs and forefingers and pick my toes, the door in front of me opens and I see a lot of bald, greasy heads and mops of blonde hair sprouting from white coats. It looks like one thing, one _doctorganism_. From the center of the mass a single doctor is ejected and she enters the examination room.

She pushes the door closed behind her, piling the other doctors up against each other in the hall. She turns to me, looking breathless and excited to talk to me.

“Hey, I’m Diane Rushdie, M.D.”

“Hi.”

“So, I read your chart. None of the others thought I should say anything, because what’s the point, but I’m here to tell you there’s something very wrong with you.”

It isn’t the best start to a friendship, in my opinion.

“What is that?”

I’m thinking _hey, big fella, you probably have cancer. Or some rare blood disease. You got some deadly thing and now she’ll tell you and you’ll have to divvy up the rest of your years or months and say your goodbyes and all that._

No.

She says, “In about ten minutes you’re going to split apart, and a person who’s been using you as a host body will emerge from your husk.”

Which, obviously I’m not super expecting to hear. So I ask for clarification, and yeah, what she says still sounds a lot like what she just said a moment before:

“A different person is going to come out of you in about ten minutes and you’ll just be a pile of flesh on the floor.”

It’s pretty hard to take.

“What the fuck?”

“Basically inside of you there’s another person and he or she is going to be taking over the space you occupy in the universe and you’ll be dead, in about ten minutes.”

This is a joke, I’ve decided, a real big joke. I’ve never heard of this disease before. Now, I guess academically I’m _aware_ that there are probably thousands of diseases I have no idea exist, and a doctor probably has a slightly better idea about something like that, but a person having a condition where they _open up like a pea pod_ and instead of organs and bones _another person_ comes out? Right? I mean, this is a joke.

“Wait a minute,” I say, remembering something. I know her game. This is some candid camera show and I’ve got proof.

“What?”

“You said your name was Rushdie, right?”

“Yeah, Diane Rushdie.”

“And now you’re rushing my death along. This is just some prank, isn’t it?”

“Oh. Haha, yes, I could see how you would think that.” Rushdie laughs again. “Haha. Unfortunately, no, your death is very much going to happen very soon here. I have the chart that shows the parasite is only going to wait a few more minutes to bust from the casing that is you.”

Let me pause here to interject while this is happening to me, that I happen to think laughing at a patient with a terminal illness is rude, so there’s a part of me that at this point still pretty much believes it’s still possible this is all a joke. So I say:

“And if I open the door and ask any one of those doctors out there what they think, they’ll say the same thing you said?“

“Oh yes, we all discussed it,” Dr. Rushdie says. “None of them wanted me to tell you.”

“Maybe they didn’t want you to tell me because it’s not true, what you’re saying is just some weird made up diagnosis and that’s not something a real doctor would tell me?”

“Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that. Why don’t you open the door and ask one of them like you said?”

“Okay.” I stand up and I open the door a crack. They’re all still out there, milling around, scratching their heads, mumbling, waiting.

“Which of you have seen my charts?”

Each cell in the the mass of doctors all answer in the affirmative, either by raising their hands, nodding, or saying “Yeah.” They’d seen what the machines had printed out on my chart.

“Is someone about to jump out of me?”

Eyes slide away from mine, faces turn down, feet shuffle. I close the door. I sigh. I turn around.

“So you’re telling me, Dr. Rushdie, that I have an extremely incurable and imminent deadly disease; one that ends my life by spawning another not alive right now person, and I only have about eight minutes to live, is that right?”

The doctor holds up a hand, her thumb and forefinger together in a circle. So that’s it. _I’m over._

I think of...

“You don’t happen to have my family out there, ready to run through the door and say their goodbyes, do you?”

She shakes her head. “In fact, in cases like these most families choose to accept the new inner person as a part of their family. Sure they’ll remember you, but there’ll be someone else to take your place.”

I start being unable to breathe. _More symptoms._

“Is this…” I stammer, “part of it?”

Rushdie checks my breathing and my pulse.

“No,” she says, “I think you are just really scared and angry. But think about it like this – the mourning period for your family will be extremely short.”

“I don’t care, I won’t get to see any of that!” I shout at her, “And the guy who comes out of me is probably going to be some douchebag!”

“All of the inner people I’ve ever met have been really polite, really good,” Dr. Rushdie says.

“Yeah, well. Maybe mine will be a douchebag just to break the pattern. Also it came from me and I obviously wasn’t good enough to live out the rest of my life.”

She pats my head.

“Listen, it’s not your fault that this is happening to you. This illness doesn’t happen to bad people or to good people: it just happens. Nobody knows why, or why the inner people always immediately claim personhood and seek asylum in the nearest church. How they always think to do that will never make sense to me. I suppose it’s a defense mechanism.”

Like cymbals crashing over my ears it hits me I have no time. No time to eventually get to the dreams I’d had my entire life, no time to finally get around to directing a film, writing a book or even getting a good job and not living off my parents for once. I am six or seven minutes from the end. I decide even if it is a short amount of time, I don’t want to spend it here, with this doctor and her smug professionalism.

“What’s it like outside today?”

“It’s very cold,” Dr. Rushdie says.

“Thanks. I’m gonna go now.”

I get up off the examining table, hearing the sweaty crinkle of the paper peeling from my butt for the last time. That particular sound I don’t think I’ll miss.

I open the door and squeeze into the hallway with the doctors.

“Dead and someone else in five minutes here, make way,” I say, and the sea of medical professionals parts. I run for the elevator.

The elevator down is slow. I think about looking at my hands, trying to take them in one last time, but thinking about what’s inside them just makes me sad. I want to look only at the numbers changing, which is still one of the worst ways to feel your life slip away. By the time I reach the ground floor (finally!) I probably only have a minute or two left.

I rush past people in the waiting room, people in queue to be treated for various ailments. As I flow past I imagine trading with them, trading what’s wrong with me for what’s wrong with them. I’ll take cancer, gladly. I’ll raise a tapeworm like it’s my own. Faces follow me, eyes lit up with interest — _there goes a lab animal, a mad ape on the loose!_ I push through the double doors and start pounding the pavement.

Now I’m in the road, sprinting, blue asbestos gown flapping behind me, bare ass a beacon for every honking pervert. I’m going to die, and all that’s left to decide is where. I pull the gown the rest of the way off, for speed, and lumber toward where I can see sunlight busting through tree cover.

I stop, gasping, and stumble into the circle of sunlight. My feet are numb. Goosebumps tickle every pore. I feel my mother’s touch on my face. My skin starts to itch, starts to boil. Cars swerve around me, and people shout out windows that I’ll get myself killed and to put on some damn pants. When will it happen?

Now?

_Now?_

I’m still here.

A sparrow knocks a piece of bread out of another’s mouth. No, it’s a popcorn kernel.

The sun comes out from behind the clouds. I look directly into it and _give birth_.

---

“Excuse me,” came a voice from behind Carolyn as she walked on her way to return books to the library. She turned. It was a naked woman, covered in blood.

“Excuse me,” the woman said. “I am a person. I think I just killed someone. I’m looking for the nearest church. I’d like to seek asylum until things are figured out. Do you think you could point me there?”

Carolyn couldn’t, but she could scream, so she did that.


It's Not Yours

Jesse


# Jesse

Joey didn't usually have trouble sleeping after they made love. He’d just roll over and wake up the next morning.

That night he lay staring at the ceiling until his back hurt, then turned on his side. Mary was asleep already. What had he thought she did afterwards? Knit or read or something? That hadn’t happened. Why had he assumed she had to be doing anything at all?

When his side began to hurt he turned the other way. What time was it? It had to be getting late now, hadn’t it? After midnight, at least. His stomach growled. Enough of this. He’d get up and walk downstairs, make himself a bowl of cereal and drink some milk. Watch a bit of tele-vision. Maybe fall asleep in the chair.

His stomach growled again. Louder. He swatted at it. Three seconds later and the sound came once more. It confused him - it didn’t feel like his stomach was growling. Three more seconds and he realized it was coming from Mary. He smiled in the dark, marveling at the volume of his sleeping wife’s digestive tract. He imagined it full of food, pushing air bubbles around. It sounded animal. A bullfrog chirping in a pond some-where. He imagined Mary’s belly blowing up in the dark like the sack under the frog’s chin. Three more seconds and it came again.

“Gwaaaa.”

He counted along, tapping his finger on the bed between them. One. Two. Three.

“Gwaaaa.”

This was uncanny. How long could it go on for, at this rate? The growling noises coming from a stomach were usually from the resettling of whatever was left inside, weren’t they? Shouldn’t it settle already? Surely the noises would stop.

“Gwaaaa.”

But they didn’t stop. He counted off nine more times in the dark, fascinated. He put his hand on her belly and felt them ripple. One. Two. Three.

“Joey.”

He froze. It wasn’t his wife’s voice. It sounded like the frog. Her belly had said his name. He stopped counting but three seconds later it came again.

“Joey.”

“What?” He said, too stupefied to keep silent. What did he expect it to say next? Surely it wouldn't answer him. Had he even heard it really say his name at all?

“Listen.”

“Oh my God.” He wanted to shake her, to wake her up and make it stop, but couldn’t bring himself to move. Instead, he counted. One. Two. Three.

“Hello.”

He felt his head go flat, his eyes saw ribbons of white in the dark. Was his nose bleeding? His finger started tapping again. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“I am.”

Joey held his breath. What would it tell him next? That it was hungry? What would he do if it said it wanted a sandwich - would he jump from the bed and throw himself out the window? He already wanted to, and who the fuck cared if it said “hungry,” or not?

“The Lord.”

If he had been himself he would have dismissed the entire thing. But he was tired, traumatized. He had also started thinking about his mother and the puddle of blood that had looked like Jesus. This was like that. Joey wasn’t religious, not to the letter, but he went to church and he pretended to understand. He’d tried to read the Bible, at least.

“You are?” he asked his wife’s gut.

“I am.”

If someone had told him he’d one night be talking to God in his wife’s belly growls, he would have probably turned around and walked away from that man as fast as he could. Now, he was surprised at how easily he accepted it.

For the next five minutes he kept quiet, listening to it speak. The Lord said, in two syllable pairs at the same three second interval:

“There is...a child...inside...Mary... He will...become...the Christ...reborn...

“I am...telling...you this...so that...when he... is born...you will...love and...keep him...as though...he were...your own.”

“He’s not mine?” Joey said, confused.

“Mine.”

“Oh. Right. Do I have to name him anything? Like, should he be called Jesus, or what?”

But Mary’s belly didn’t shiver again.

Joey went downstairs and ate his cereal, unsure of how to feel. He was numb. He sat in front of the television and watched high definition insects devour each other until he was too keyed up to do anything but pass out.

The nine months went by fairly quick. At work, Joey was promoted to assistant foreman. Mary stayed at home and made baby clothes out of multicolored yarn. When it came, it was darker than both of them, and Middle-Eastern looking. Mary was apprehensive, afraid of what Joey would say, but he didn’t. He figured God just made this one look like the last.

They named the boy Jesse, and Joey did his best to love him.

When Jesse was five, he set fire to the neighbor’s house. Joey maintained it was an accident, but kept his reasoning to himself. He’d been at work, and Mary out shopping for groceries. It had to be a coincidence. No son of God was going to set a house on fire. Child Protective Services came by and asked questions, but Joey didn’t know how to answer. He wasn’t around most of the time, and sure, Jesse had tantrums just like the next kid, but wasn’t the type to play with fire. Mary was convinced they’d be slapped with neglect and CPS would take Jesse, but it didn’t happen. It all just went away.

In elementary school, Jesse and the principal got to know each other too well, and Mary kept having to apologize for the other kids who went home with black eyes and bloody noses. Every time Joey heard about it he got concerned, because he knew how cruel other kids could be to someone who looked different. But no son of God would be a bully, he was sure.

In middle school Jesse got caught selling drugs to sixth graders. Ecstasy in pill form, with little crosses printed on the sides. He told one girl it would give her a religious experience, and she’d had a minor freakout in a bathroom stall, sweating through her sundress and tearing her hair out. She had to get stitches in each of her palms, from how her fingernails dug in. 

Joey couldn’t fool himself anymore. His kid was one of the troublemakers. What if that whole talking belly thing had just been his imagination? His conversation with the Lord just a waking dream? But he’d believed it so long now that there wouldn’t be any going back, even in the face of doubt. Jesse was just a late bloomer, he was sure of it. When the time came, he’d show the world who he was. Lamb of God, version two.

Jesse fought with his mother often, belittling her and threatening physical domination. He was taller than both of them by then. Joey kept out of the disputes, and before long he could tell his son despised him as well. Any time Joey spoke up, Jesse just sneered at him. “You're not my father,” he'd say. “Look at you. Whiter than she is.”

In high school, Jesse started a cult. It started with a few kids, jocks and bruisers, but that little group persuaded and intimidated a bunch more to join. By the time any of the teachers found out about it, kids were already cutting off bits of themselves and feeding each other as a kind of sacrament. Of course, they couldn't prove it was Jesse, even though he admitted it freely. The trouble was, every other kid in the cult also claimed responsibility for its existence. The school couldn't kick them all out (by that point they numbered almost two-hundred) so the assistant principal made an example of the few he thought had the largest likelihood of having a hand in it. Jesse was one of these.

By sixteen the boy had turned inward, and kept to himself in his room. Joey hardly saw him, and even his mother who was home all day only saw him for brief moments in the afternoons, when he'd take whole boxes of cereal into his lair, where he played crashing death metal and read Nietzche. Mary didn't bother trying to speak to him anymore, because any word or look she made was always taken as a provocation and turned into an argument. And then she had no recourse. He would yell, and she would end up crying. At night she told her husband. Joey felt bad for her, but he had more responsibility than ever at work, since he'd been promoted again, to foreman.

One night, Jesse stole a car and led police on a high-speed chase for over an hour. When they caught him, he told them he was the son of God. They cuffed his wrists and ankles and brought him in.

Joey came to the station and bailed him out with some money he'd been saving in a high-yield account for retirement. The boy scowled at him and didn't speak the entire way home.

That night, after his wife fell asleep, Joey cried. He did it quietly, and only allowed himself to keep on for ten minutes. After that, he pulled it in and tried to sleep. He couldn't.

"Gwaaaa."

His wife's stomach growled.

"Gwaaaa."

Joey's heart quickened, like it always did when Mary's belly did this. Maybe this time it would be the Lord telling him it had made a mistake. "Sorry," it would say, in its two syllable halt, "I was - was wrong - not Christ - just a - bad kid."

"Please," he hissed. "Please tell me what to do."

He counted, breath held.

One.

Two.

Three.


Leather-lip Lightman and the Ice Train


# Leather-lip Lightman and the Ice Train

He was waiting for the train long before I walked up. The bill of his ball cap reached down across his dark face and he sat slumped for heat on the bench, puffing his breath out in icy little balls.

“Cold one tonight, my brother?”

He nodded without looking at me, and folded his wrinkled brown hands across his lap. He squinted down the track.

“Train’s comin.’”

The train station was empty but for us, the only light shining down in a column from a single covered bulb poking into the darkness.

I nodded, and looked where he’d looked. A single light flashed on and off in the distance. “It may well be, brother. There’s an ice storm coming as well. Where are you headed?”

He lifted his capped face to me then, and seemed to grin. “I’m goin’ home, mister. Back to New Orleans. My life here is over.”

“Chicago’s a Hell of a town,” I said, tipping a hand back toward the great mountain range of lights that sat behind us. The man chuckled and shook his head.

“Chicago’s no town, sir. No, no sir. It’s a cold dead hand, a rake. It’s a smilin’ man at a roulette wheel. It’s a promise that leaves your hat and your pockets empty. It’s an alley full o’ dashed hopes. But now it’s a past—my past. Cause the train’s comin.’”

I nodded. “It may well be, brother. It may well be.”

He slid his slumped figure to the left and patted the seat beside him. “Here, mister. Got it all warm for ya.’”

A cold wind howled down the track, and the lights of the oncoming train continued to blink in the distance. I sat down. The man turned his body toward me.

“You leavin’ too?”

I nodded. He nodded in return, then turned his attention back down the track. “It’s been down there like that for a long time. Must be another stop. Must be. But it’ll be here soon.”

We sat there like that, watching the lights, for several minutes. Me and a man whose heat was slowly leaching from his pores.

“While we wait,” I said, breaking the silence, “I have a story. If you’d like to hear it.”

The other man nodded and the white of his teeth lit up the space between his dark lips as he opened them. He spoke, jaws clenched, each word hissing into the night with a steamy visual counterpart. “If it’ll make the train come faster, please. Tell.”

I cleared my throat and began, wasting no time.

“Seven years ago, I came to this train station. I met a man here, on this bench. He called himself the Lip. Leather-Lip Lightman. He was waiting for the train, said he was leaving Chicago. I told him the train had shut down the day before, and that it wouldn’t be coming. Not that night, at least. It was a cold night, and the Lip wasn’t well-dressed.

I asked him if he had a place to go. He told me he wasn’t going anywhere.

‘The train’ll come,’ he said. ‘The train’ll come.’

He said he could see its lights. An hour or so passed, and I asked him to come with me.

‘There’s an ice storm coming,’ I said. ‘I can keep you for the night, and tomorrow you can come back if you still want. The train isn’t coming.’

But the Lip shook his head. ‘It’ll be here. And when it comes, I’ll be on it. And Chicago will be behind me. Chicago,’ he said, was ‘a cold dead hand. A rake.’”

The man next to me nodded in agreement, as if he himself hadn’t said the same thing just minutes before.

“A rake, it sure is.”

“And so, with parting words to the man, I left, hoping he’d come to some kind of sense and find somewhere warm to spend the night.”

I paused here, and stared down the tracks. The blinking lights seemed to have come closer. Faintly, on the wind, I could hear the muted sound of a train’s whistle. The dark man with the ball cap had his full attention on me, however. His eyes were wide, the brilliant whites of them watering against the dead cold.

“You came back, didn’t you? You came back an’ he was gone, wasn’t he?”

“I came back. In the morning, after a thin layer of ice had coated everything slick, like glaze on a doughnut. The man who’d called himself the Lip was not on the bench.”

“See, I knew it.”

“He wasn’t there, and he wasn’t at any of the other benches. I figured he’d gone. At that point I’d turned, turned to walk back out to my car, and I saw something out of the corner of my eye. A man-sized totem, that’s what I remembered thinking. I looked back and there he was. A tall figure, the Lip, standing alone way down the line. Standing along the tracks. So I walked to him. I walked to him and said, ‘Cold one this morning, my brother?’ And I touched him, on his shoulder.

“Only it wasn’t like touching a man.

“He was hard, slick. My hand slid off. I came to realize he was frozen there, frozen to the ground. Icicles grew from the corners of his dead eyes, and his smile was painted on with frost.”

I ended my story there. The dark man with the ball cap squinted at me, raising first one eyebrow then the other. When he decided he believed me he cleared his throat and looked toward the ground.

“Hell of a story, mister. Whale of a tale. Jesus.” He looked back up at me. “Poor bastard didn’t even get to ride the train.”

I shook my head. “That’s not it. That’s not it at all. You see, brother, I’m quite sure the Lip’s train came that night. Came in the middle of the ice storm. The story isn’t that he didn’t get to ride the train. The story is that when he got on, he left his body standing right over there.” I pointed. The dark man in the ball cap followed my gaze, shivering.

“You see brother, that train? Those lights, and their whistle on the wind?”

“I see it, mister.”

“That’s not your train. That’s the Lip’s train. That’s my train.”

“What are you—”

“You’re leaving Chicago for New Orleans. I’m leaving Chicago for nowhere. That’s the difference. Be wise, brother. Leave now. Anyone with a life still to live should be elsewhere. The tracks are closed for you tonight.” The train’s whistle sounded, and the other man jumped.

“Jesus Christ, mister. You’re scaring me.” He searched my face for some kind hint of jocularity, for some sign I was pulling his leg. He found none. He took a last look down the tracks toward the approaching lights and rose to his feet.

“I think...I think I’m in the wrong place. It was...nice to meet you.”

“Have a good night, brother,” I said after him as he fled into the darkness.

The wind howled down the tracks, licking over the cool steel ties and sucking the moisture from my eyes. My mouth pulled back into a cool smile. It was time. I stood up and walked to the platform, and as the train pulled up to greet me

---

The ice storm began.


Machine


# Machine

I don’t know which one of me is writing this, or if I even need to. Maybe one of me wrote it already, or is planning on it. Maybe we all write something like this at some point. I don’t know, but I’m the only one of me around right now, and I have nothing better to do.

When I was little, and all of me were, I used to dream nested things. I’d be in a supermarket, carrying a bag full of jelly beans. Then I’d wake up, a floating eight year old with a bag of jelly beans, daring my bed to float up and meet me. Out the window a few more of me would be playing in the dark. Jump rope, that one. Two playing tag, another four or five swimming in the pool. I understand that these are all me in different dreams I already had, or haven’t yet.

Looking around is okay, but there are words on the walls. Big and red, and I can’t read them. It’s not until I’m older that I start to read in dreams, and at eight years old, the words drop me and I wake up without the jelly beans, under my bed.

I must have fallen through, or else I roll out from under expecting to find another one of me still asleep, and maybe one above him, floating with a bag of jelly beans. But at eight, no. This doesn’t happen until later, when I’m twenty-four.

I’m twenty-four and this isn't a dream.

The floating me isn’t holding jelly beans. He’s got a plane. A flat surface that’s black on both sides. It’s not any particular shape. Not rectangular, or circular like those ACME black holes Wile E. Coyote used to buy in bulk on Saturday mornings, but that same general idea. Anyway, I’m standing there, in my boxers, watching myself floating there, and another one of me asleep in the bed underneath. All of us have sleep erections, but I’m not holding mine like the other two are. I look around to see if there are any more of me, even look out the window to see if maybe some of me are playing frisbee in the dark, but I don’t see any. We’re alone.

I don’t strike myself as particularly awake. I’m probably still sleeping, anyway. I wonder what happens if I take the plane from the floating Clayton, and then I stop wondering so I can do it. He doesn’t want to let go, but it’s slippery and hard to hold with one hand. This, as I will later come to think of it, is the machine. It’s open on both sides, open like a bag. I put my hand in it, and it doesn’t come out the other side. It’s the same when I flip it over, only that side stings. I think about putting my head in, and even though I’m pretty sure I’m still asleep, I don’t do it.

I wake up twice after that, and watching it happen is almost like being dead. The floating Clayton wakes first, rolling over and yawning. He opens his eyes and looks at me, standing next to the bed with the machine in my hands. He is unsurprised. Very likely he also thinks we’re dreaming, I don’t know. I can’t read his thoughts, or see through his eyes. I’m expecting him to fall, to land on the other of us, but this doesn’t happen. He floats toward me.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“What is that thing?” He points at the machine.

“I don’t know,” I say, “You had it when you were sleeping. I took it from you.”

“Oh.” He floats thoughtfully.

The sleeping Clayton groans and pulls the pillow from under his head. He turns onto his stomach and fastens the pillow over his ears.

“Hey,” Floating Clayton and I say.

“I’m having a dream,” he says, “And it’s not the best one I’ve had, but it’s better than being awake. Take what you want, my wallet’s on the bed stand.” Then he’s snoring again.

“You haven’t fallen yet,” I say. Floating Clayton shakes his head.

“Here,” I say, and look around the room. Near the open closet is a copy of The Journey Home, from the English class we failed our senior year. It’s a book I’ve never read. I pick it up and open it to the first page.

“Here,” I say, “Read.” Floating Clayton looks apprehensive, but shrugs. He leans forward.

“Too dark,” he says. “Let me hold the thing again.” I give him the machine and go to turn on the lights. We flinch at the brightness, and all of a sudden I don’t feel asleep anymore. I have to pee. I’m hungry.

“The branches were strewn above them like distorted mosaics of crucifixions, the hawthorn bushes blocking out the few isolated stars to ensnare them within a crooked universe of twigs and briars.” He sits back in the air and smiles at me. “Still up here,” he says.

“We’ve read in dreams before,” I say, “so maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Yeah,” floating me says, “But we’ve never read that book. And if we haven’t read it, that means whatever I just read came from our subconscious. Which means we’re a genius.”

Maybe that’s when I know we won’t wake up again, that we’re as awake as we get. Floating Clayton probably knows too, or wants to believe he knows, because he’s the floating one. I envy him. “I have to pee,” we say. The sleeping Clayton groans again. We ignore him. “You first,” I say, “you’re floating.”

“Okay.” He floats to the bathroom. From beside the bed I can hear him cursing, and imagine I should have gone first. Peeing with an erection is already hard enough, and to couple that with levitation must make for a frustrating game of spurts and wet walls.

I decide to wake me up. “Hey,” I say, “I’m not a robber and I’m not leaving. You’re me and we’re both here. One of us is floating and we’re not asleep.” The methodical rhythmic way in which I say this makes him groan again, but then he is looking at me.

“Why the hell is the light on?”

“I turned it on.”

“I wouldn’t have turned it on. You’re not me. Leave me alone.” He closes his eyes. “Why the fuck would I dream of waking up and wanting to go back to sleep? Stupid.

The floating Clayton comes back. I don’t hear him, because he doesn’t have to walk. He looks embarrassed. “I used the shower,” he says. “I’m sorry about the rest of it, but I can’t get low enough to clean anything. I can’t float up or down.” I feel bad for him.

“Here,” I say, and give him my hand. I pull, but he stays where he is. Pretty soon I’m hanging from his arm, but he doesn’t so much as dip.

“Stop it,” he says, “that hurts like nobody’s business.”

I stop. “Sorry.”

He shrugs. I walk to the bathroom. It’s wet. I try to use the toilet, but I can’t aim it right, so I use the shower too. When I get back, floating Clayton is over the bed, wrestling the pillow from the other one.

“Fuck off, man!” Floating Clayton lets go of the pillow. “Sorry. It’s just…” He pulls back and slaps me, the one in the bed, in the face. “It’s just that I’m NOT a fucking DREAM!”

Okay?

Maybe that’s how it started. I wasn’t there, not directly. Three of me were. The machine makes everything work differently. I don’t have memories of it, but it’s what comes out whenever I try to write down what happened. So it’s probably true.

Another one of me came out of the machine two hours after that. Maybe that one was me, but probably not. It doesn’t matter. Let’s say it was me.

I’m falling, like in a dream where I had to read something. Only, I fall sideways, out of a hole that another one of me is holding onto, into my room. Three of me are standing there, arguing, and my head is bleeding. One of me is floating, and all of them stop arguing and look at me.

“What the fuck?” we all say, and then, because we all said it, we laugh.

It must have happened just that way. And before you start thinking that the machine was just a me-maker, you should know that before the day was out, it had sent through four copies of my future wife, three pairs of my future children, all at different ages, and a man who says he’s me at seventy. This last was most interesting to us, especially the floating one, because seventy-year-old Clayton also floated.

He did it quietly, in the corner, and watched the rest of us with wet eyes.


Magic


# Magic

Clifford told people he was a magician. That he’d been one ever since the moment he was born, when he’d sawed himself in half.

The story went like this.

His mothers were conjoined twins. They half-shared a uterus, or rather, shared a uterus that halved halfway down, split like the cloven trunk of a tree. Each woman had a vagina of her own, and when Clifford was conceived (which, he likes to say, was a whole separate magic trick) the little embryo he became attached itself to and grew on the very place the two sisters became one, on the very precipice of their connective misfortune.

On a particular night, and it was a Thursday, Clifford got this far into his monologue without anyone in the audience so much as gasping. He supposed that having two mothers was becoming some kind of social norm, and that was all right. It always bothered him when they reacted too early. When they reached for a polite applause or sympathetic ooh. So far, everyone in the audience kept silent. That was good. Because here was the trick.

“I grew there,” he said, “a fragile egg, to the size of a pear. Then to a gourd, a pumpkin. Okay, not a very big pumpkin.” No canned or polite laughter.

“Finally I was due to arrive. A child of conjunction. And here I came, but from which mother? Which would bear me, birth me, send me into the world wet and screaming? The doctors didn’t know either - there was one on each side, holding each of my mothers open, waiting for me to slide down. That was when they discovered I was twins, that one of me was coming headfirst and one of me breach, and out came the instruments, one cold metal grabbing spoon for each of us, pulling.”

“Out we came, but again the doctors were surprised. The nurses were so bewildered one of them fainted and the other one puked on her. From the right mother, my head, my chest, my arms. From the left, my legs, my torso. I shot blood at them, posing. Ta-da.”

Clifford stripped, dropping clothes in piles at his feet. It was a change he’d timed, improved, perfected. Before anyone had a chance to look away he was naked in front of them, deep purple scars running like train tracks across him just where they’d expect, where he’d been stitched and sewn back together so hastily. His spine curled in on itself in a Q, and now he heard the gasps, the cries. Now he heard the same hurking noises the nurse, and every nurse after her had made.

Clifford told people he was a magician, but his only trick was this. On a Thursday, this particular day, he threw his arms in the air and yelled.

“Ta-da!”


Nutella


# Nutella

It starts with me in the lobby of a bank in Chicago.

I don’t know how I got here, or why I’m wearing a t-shirt and a jacket only. It’s twenty-five degrees, according to a school ticker that also advertises that seventy-nine percent of its students rated excellent on the ISAT. I'm standing between two glass paneled doors. One leads to the cold, one leads to the interior of the bank. I'm looking ominous near a pair of automated teller machines. I'm fairly sure I'm waiting for someone.

When he or she shows up, I'll know. I don’t worry about the fact that I don’t know who I’m waiting for, or that I have no recollection of traveling to this particular bank. I feel I probably walked. I’m wearing leather shoes without socks, and there's a slippery accumulation of dirt and sweat under my feet. I'm sliding around in boats made from dead animals.

I don’t know how long I’ve been waiting, but my skin is cold and there's a persistent line of snot rappelling from my left nostril. It could be the silk from a spider’s asshole, and it never stops coming. After several moments of trying to wipe it away, I no longer bother. It comes, and I let it, seeing how far it'll reach before breaking off. It gets to my knee, and the lower half of it breaks off and gathers in a pile in front of me.

The process repeats.

This is me when I’m alone. I look into the bank and find a hefty teller staring at me. I make myself look as suspicious as I can. The line of snot is swinging back and forth, and my hands are jammed into my pockets as far as they will go. I'm slouching, and with my mouth I begin to appear as if I'm speaking gibberish. The hefty man looks away.

Later, when I'm alone, I'm in Sears Roebuck. It's filled with short round women, latina, tugging along little children. They are shopping for the same clothes they’re already wearing. Nothing fits together. I think, what the fuck have we done? You don’t belong here, I want to say to one. You belong in a desert, a jungle, sagging breasts hanging bare and sticks stuck through your face. What the fuck, I want to say, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry we made you into what you are now, because otherwise what are youdoing here, in this northern wasteland, in this tiny building with this failing capitalism? You don’t belong. Neither of us belong.

I’m looking for socks. I find some, women’s, on a wall labeled “accessories.” This description isn’t odd, it’s wrong. Socks are a necessity. An addiction. There's nothing greater than the feeling of pulling on new, never-worn socks. There's no drug that can replicate it, no pair of tits that can make you forget it, no book in the world that can make you feel such faith in humanity.

But these socks are women’s socks. There are no men’s socks, it seems. Not even when I ride the escalator to the second floor, an ancient thing that rumbles like a washing machine and forces me to imagine an open Maytag waiting for me at the top like some woman’s gaping mouth, wanting to eat me alive.

No socks even then, at the top of the Maytag escalator. I return to accessories. I take a pair of socks. I don’t have any money. There's a bag in my left hand, and a book spilling out of jacket pocket. I have just bought Voltaire, Joyce, and _The Turn Of the Screw._ My pocket is housing Paul Auster’s _In The Country of Last Things_. I know it's probably that I’ll never finish any of them, but the words are a comfort.

I take the socks. Women’s white socks. I don’t hide them.

I walk to the cashier. I ask him where the bathroom is, and I can see in his eyes that he thinks I'm going there to get sick. I don’t look well. Perhaps this is a common occurrence at Sears Roebuck, and he is more worried about me emptying myself on the floor of the bathroom than he is of me committing any sort of larceny. He points, grudgingly, behind him. I can see in his face that if I get sick, he will have to clean it up.

I don’t like him.

In the bathroom I put down Voltaire. I rip the bag of women’s socks open with my teeth, and I pull a pair of them on over my feet.

There's nothing like the feeling, have I told you that? No opiate, no woman, no book is any better. I put my shoes on and stand up. My books I place on the toilet tank. I look around at the bathroom, imagining the man on his hands and knees, scrubbing away. My fingers I place down my throat. I yark and cover the tile with bananas, nutella, coke and blood. The mixture is a warm brown.

This is me, still in the bank, still standing there with a rope of snot hanging from my nose. The man I’m waiting for enters, uses an ATM, and motions for me to follow him. We leave, and begin to walk. Wind comes at us directly, freezing my eyeballs and the liquid inside the cochlea of my right ear, making me nauseous.

We don’t talk. Inside the coffee shop we go to, I order a coke and a banana and brown sugar crepe. The price should have been 4.75 and another 1.50 for the coke, but the man (he is Greek, and his English is very good) tells me it's 8.82. I don’t argue. He cannot have misheard me, but he gives me something different. A banana and nutella crepe. I haven’t had nutella before, but it reminds me of chocolate and so that’s what I pretend it's.

I'm full. The man across from me is typing on a laptop. We still haven’t spoken.

Next we're in a bookstore. I can't find any poetry, so I pick the Joyce, the Voltaire, and the Henry James. Behind one of the racks the man who doesn’t speak gives me two keys, which I pocket. At the checkout there's a tall girl with crimped blond hair and glasses. Her voice is musical, and she smiles at me. She smiles at everyone. I think about having her naked, bent over a pile of books. She smiles at me, and tells me I’m buying the good stuff. I think about giving her the good stuff on a pile of the good stuff. She smiles at me, and she says thank you, and I say thank you, and I leave.

The man has left me, only moments before tucking a small wad of paper into my hand and turning the other way. I read it, then chew it up. I spit it onto the side of a building as I pass, and it sticks. The building is Sears Roebuck. I think about my feet, and the way they squish around in my shoes. I think about socks, about the feeling of pulling on new ones. I go in.

The door is a revolving door, and as I go through one of its little corner-pie chambers I think about this city and its unhealthy obsession with revolving doors. Human roundabouts.

I’m walking to the address on the paper, hungry again after unloading my crepe. I see a woman with a white puffy dog, watch a man who looks a little like Brad Pitt get out of his car. I see a cyclist with long hair and rubber bands around his ankles, and watch a little girl with a soccer ball bound out of a house to get into an SUV. I realize everything is significant, and order doesn’t matter. At the same time, nothing is significant, and there's no order. Profound, and I don’t care. The square key unlocks the apartment building, the round one the apartment. That is how it has been and how it'll be. And at the same time, things fall apart. Nothing lasts.

Not even anything.


Psych


# Psych

“So you’re here because you’re having too much sex.”

The kid is twenty-four. Dr. Werner is forty. She frowns. The kid is having a hard time looking at her. His t-shirt has a drawing of Florida on it. Under the drawing, it says “I’m no island, but you’re going to love my peninsula.”

“I just need some kind of…” the kid starts saying, “like, can you give me a pill that’ll make it stop happening?”

“To stop the sex from happening?”

“Yeah. I don’t have any control over it.”

Doctor Werner’s frown deepens.

“You mean, you can’t stop yourself? Like a compulsion?”

The kid is confused. “Not…not really. More like, it happens, and I don’t want it to happen.”

Dr. Werner pauses, breathes, and asks. “Are you being forced to have sex? Is someone making you do this?”

The kid looks confused again. “In my dream? No. I’m just there, having sex. No one’s forcing me.”

“In your dream?”

“Yeah. That’s why I want the pills.”

Dr. Werner lowers her head. She sighs. “It was my understanding we were talking about real world behavior. You made an appointment with me, said it was about a sexual addiction.”

The kid seems sheepish now.

“It is. My subconscious is addicted to sex. Sorry, I don’t know a lot about this kind of thing. I thought you guys were interested in dreams.”

“Sometimes. But we don’t assume the problems our patients come to us with are dream problems.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Let’s start over. You’re having dreams about sex, and you want them to stop.”

“Yeah. It’s like, every time I go to sleep. They’re really real. So when I wake up, I spend all my time during the day thinking about them. I can’t get anything done.”

“I see. How active are you, sexually? Can I ask when’s the last time you were sexually active? Or masturbated?”

“I…” the kid looks down. “I can’t…I don’t get erections. I don’t think I’ve had an orgasm.”

“What about when you wake from these dreams? Erections then?”

“Not really. Sometimes, halfway. But it’s not like the dreams are particularly arousing.”

“The sex dreams aren’t arousing?”

“Well, it’s always some girl I’d never be attracted to. My fat cousin. Girls from school who ate at the last table in the lunchroom. Last night I dreamed about my fourth grade teacher. She looked kind of like you.”

“Hmm.”

“Can you help me? Prescribe me something?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I’m a psychologist.”


Renter's Insurance

# Renter’s Insurance

The morning air is cold and sour in landlord Wayne Marshall's nostrils.

He stands on the Crims' porch, heart in his throat. A deep breath then _knock, knock,_ he raps knuckles against the still, the quiet. His teeth chatter. He shudders. Waiting, hands in pockets, three steps from the door, ready should it swing open. Ready for the gaunt height of a man with a crabby disposition. Wayne gathers himself up, prepares himself for the opening of the door.

It doesn't come.

Checking his watch now, two minutes spent waiting, not a sound from within the house. The neighborhood is still, like people are asleep or elsewhere. No cars on the street.

“Mr. Crim! Mrs. Crim! Are you home? It’s your landlord again. I, uh…I’m back for the rent. I was wrong, I need it today and not the end of the week. Mr. Crim? Mrs. Crim?” He hears fear in his own voice. _Of what? What am I afraid of? That smell…?_

The smell charges from beneath the door and drives at him, making his nostrils flare. His gut clenches.

“Anybody dead in there?” Wayne whispers, his breath dancing in front of him. He checks his watch. Five minutes on the porch is long enough. Keys unsteady into the lock, twist and push. The door opens like he’s said a magic word.

“Oh God.”

Wayne breathes heavily through his nose, a mistake recognized as he retches, throwing hands over his mouth. His eyes water. He’s managed to repress his gag reflex and he’s gulping dead air.

“Mr. Crim, are you here? Mrs. Crim? Is anyone here? I’m coming in now. It’s me, your landlord. I’m going to leave the door open, okay?” _In case I need to jet._

Two steps in puts him among the clutter; clothes, notebooks, dishes, and half-eaten bits of food on plates. There's an inch of stagnant water covering the floor. _Basement must be flooded._

To his right, what used to be a living room. To his left, a hallway and a half-open door.

Wayne wades left, following a trail of notebooks. He picks one up, opens it. Full of writing, each page nearly black with ink, each line of writing small and even.

Wayne pushes the door in, the door to the kitchen and has to step back again from a new, stronger version of the smell.

Here, slumped over a notebook, dead, is the vulture of a man. Josiah Crim’s arms lay before him, his dead right hand clutching a pen.

Wayne gives himself a moment to come to terms with his situation, then wades closer to the body, squinting to make out the last of the old man's writing. The lines he reads make his vision swim.

He reads them again, unbelieving.

_We have a visitor today. Our landlord, Mr. Marshall. Hello, Mr. Marshall, how are you? We're afraid we're busy today and won’t be able to talk much. I’ll have Marjorie brew you some coffee. Is that all right?_

Wayne thinks. Has the old man committed suicide and left in his note a spiteful message, suspecting it would be Wayne who found him? He knows there must be another explanation but one isn't coming to him.

While he stands there, pondering, the hand holding the pencil moves, and the tip of the pencil goes _skritch scritch_.

Wayne goes cold.

"Mr. Crim? You're not dead?" He looks at the body, trying to see life in it. It's not possible. _I've seen roadkill with more vim and vigor._

Finally it occurs to him to lean in to read the page, expecting to see a squiggle, the result of impeccably-timed rigor mortis or similar.

Words had been added to the page. _One coffee, coming right up._

Wayne shakes his head; tears well at the corners of his eyes.

“This is insane.”

Wayne wants to jet but something inside him...changes. Everything's all right. Why should he run? He reads the rest of the words on the page.

_We're afraid Marjorie is in the bath. Would you go and get her? Swell, Mr. Marshall?_

Wayne laughs. “Of course! I'll go and see if I can't find her. The bathroom’s up the stairs, am I right? Your left?” He waits for the dead hand to move, to write a response. It doesn't. Wayne starts up the stairs.

On the way he has a thought— _You’re awful jolly for someone who found one of his tenants dead at his kitchen table._ Yes, jolly, hard to argue that. He might be the jolliest in history! A right riot in the right circumstances; a card, a firebrand.

At the upper landing, Wayne turns and enters a doorway.

The bathroom—small, cramped.

He’s unaware he’s done it—he’s pushed open the door without a knock, without a yell; he’s barged in. Feeling less jolly by the moment.

Wayne stops. Sniffs. Gags. The smell here is worse than downstairs.

He turns on the light, a yellow flicker exposing yellow linoleum and yellow curtains matted to the sides the bathtub, sealed from the inside. Wayne puts one hand over his mouth and moves forward, other hand in front of him.

He pushes aside the shower curtain and looks into a soup of bodily fluids crusted to the sides of the tub. Marjorie's been dead so long most of the bathwater's evaporated. Her toes, nose and forehead protrude from the sludge.

Wayne lets go of the curtain and wipes his fingers on his jeans. He turns to the bathroom mirror and sees himself smiling. Behind him, in the little mirror, the bathtub. No sludge, no body. In the mirror the bathtub looks pristine.

Wayne turns around. Crim's dead wife Marjorie is still there, still toes up.

“Christ. Everything about this is…” He steps back into the hallway. “Forget about the mirror, get your phone out and call someone.”

Probably the police first, and then possibly someone from Sunshine Cleaning Company. He's dialing in the number, deciding the first words of his phone call, and then there's a splash from the bathtub.

He freezes. Does he want to know? He's already out in the hallway, what if he peeks back in and—

SPLASH! _Someone sitting up in the bath._

“No, no no.” Wayne turns around and walks back down the hall. He hears a wet foot on the bathroom floor. Could it be something else? He reaches the stairs.

His eyesight flickers, strobes. He takes the steps two at a time. He's back on the first floor, back in the kitchen looking at the dead man huddled over a notepad on the table.

He doesn’t want to see what the notepad says now, but he’s already leaning forward to read.

_Cream and sugar, or do you take it black? Or would you like some tea? Marjorie won't mind preparing you whatever you'd like. Make yourself comfortable._

Wayne's heart is thumping, his body vibrating, his hands shaking. He looks around the kitchen, thinking of the cost of renovations following this. What had grown on the walls, the ceiling? Some kind of mold? He'll have to rustle up some elbow grease, ask high school kids or post an ad.

“Or bulldoze. That might be best.”

The dead man's hand moves. Wayne thinks he's mistaken at first, that he's seeing things, but keeps watching as the pen in the hand glides over the paper, pressing down. Writing.

Here's what it said:

_Don't be rude, Marjorie. Say hello to our guest, Mr. Marshall._

Wayne turns around and Marjorie stood there, without a head. Instead, someone or something has driven the shaft of a mop down her neck and through her torso. Her head is the head of a mop. She waves with one withered arm.

“I-I’m sorry to be rude,” Wayne said, “but I'm afraid I must be going.”

The walls around him seem to breathe out, seemed to gasp, and the thing that happened before, the jolly euphoria, came back. For the moment he was happy to stay.

“One cup.”

Marjorie nods her mop head and holds out an arm, to the left, to the door beneath the stairs. It's ajar, amid the inches of black muck covering the floor.

_The beans, I’m afraid, are in the basement. Marjorie will have to get them for you._

Marjorie walks to the door leading to the basement and pulls it open. The door seems hard to move, obstructed by the inch of slime on the floor, but she's strong and it budges easy. She descends into the water.

Wayne wants to leave, wants no longer any part of this, but his feet won't move.

Soon the head of the mop is all that remains of the visible woman. Then the mop head went under, leaving a bubbling glurp.

“Where's her head, Crim?” He leans forward to read the response, the pen already scratching words into the bottom part of the paper. Soon the dead man's hand would reach the end, and then what? Turn the page?

_She got a head off herself. How's that for a joke?_

A clique of synapses in Wayne's brain fires, a memory of being himself, something about money, he's here for money. But this is a dream now, isn't it? None of this can be real. Should he try to pull himself forward? Open an eye? Try to wake up?

_Why aren't you laughing?_, new words on the page read.

The walls seem to breathe out again. A thin dust (or mist?) settles on his skin, in his nostrils, on his eyeballs. It makes him sneeze. It makes him laugh.

He'd wake from a nightmare, but _is this a nightmare?_

Instead of the dead man's hand turning the page, it seems the page turns itself. Wayne gets down close to look, sees the dust or mold rippling across the table, sees it turning the page. He looks again at Crim, his dead tenant. Covered in the same stuff. _It's the stuff doing it, making him write._

The hand moves faster now, the pen scraping the paper. When it reaches the end of its sentence it taps hard, with emphasis. Wayne reads.

_It's rude to read over someone's shoulder, Mr. Marshall. You should have a seat. Make yourself comfortable._

Wayne feels his right foot rising up from the floor, bending his knee. It's the dust, it's moving him from beneath, _puppeteering_ him.

He realizes even through this euphoria that reminds him of being in a dream, of being high, that he's in serious trouble. He thinks briefly about what he's done with his life, what he wants to do with it, then wipes the thought aside. He won't make it home.

He feels okay about this.

The stuff makes him walk to the other side of the table, made him sit in a chair, and the walls breathe out. He feels heavy.

Across from him is the open mouth of Mr. Crim, the empty eye sockets, the dead hand.

In front of him, on the table, the dust stuff rearranges itself and forms a new notebook, much like Crim's. Next to this, the dust constructs a pen.

The notebook opens to the first page, and without wanting to, Wayne writes. His hand moves without his moving it, and in someone else's handwriting. The same blocky letters from the other notebooks, the ones inside the door, the one he'd read over Crim's shoulder.

_It's a pleasure to meet you, lord of this land. Previous tenants had plenty to say about you, and we’re curious._

"Who are you?" Wayne's mouth, his vocal chords still work, though his throat is dry and feels coated in sand.

_Call us Brawn._

Brawn moves Wayne's hand furiously, pushing the Brawn-pen into the Brawn-paper until almost the entire page is filled.

_You own this property, which means you collect a tithe from the inhabitants on a recurring basis, is what we've learned. The tithe in exchange for continued inhabitance, not for the upkeep and maintenance and health of the soil in which this property grows. Seems a poor deal for us, but a rich deal for you._

“No, I...I do things. I fix what's broken, I pay for renovations.”

_Not what we've learned._

“Okay. I haven't been as good for the Crims, but they're old, they don't use e-mail for God's sake! I collect the rent and I assume things are going well.”

_We've learned you filter communications._

Wayne says nothing. He watches the paper in front of him, watches and waits for his hand to write something else.

_When we called about the water damage, for example, you ignored us. Look up._

Wayne doesn't want to but Brawn tilts his head back and makes him look at the ceiling. Above him hangs a brown-orange bulge in the white tiled ceiling, bulbous like a spider bite.

The bulge distends and bursts. A rush of water, thick with grime and blood and dirt and Brawn, rains down on him. It lacquers him, it glazes him. Some gets in his mouth. Some gets in his eyes.

His skin itches, waves of heat overtake him, but he can't scratch. Brawn won't let him scratch.

When his vision clears, he can see he's written more.

_This land is fine, for a time, but surely there are more neighborhoods, teeming with nutrients, that you are lord of. Would you drive us there?_

Wayne feels a wave of relief, but can’t tell if it comes from him or Brawn. Does it matter? He won’t meet his end here. He won’t die like the man across from him.

“Other neighborhoods, yes. I can drive you wherever you want.”

_We regret it, but Marjorie has seemingly misplaced the beans._

“That's all right,” Wayne says.

His voice sounds different. Fuzzier.

It seems he can move again. He stands up, feeling strong, feeling proud. He walks out of the kitchen. Behind him the floor disintegrates. Mr. Crim and his kitchen table sink into the water below, reuniting him with his wife’s body in the dark soup.

Wayne steps through the front door, no longer holding the pen or pad of paper. How will Brawn talk to him now?

_Like this,_ they say in his head.

The landlord laughs, then jogs to his car, no longer cold, no longer worried about collecting rent.

They drive out of the empty neighborhood, Wayne choosing the general direction of a nearby suburb where he owns two houses.

Behind them, the neighborhood transforms, houses cold-melting into the earth, cars in garages becoming soil, bodies in beds rotting to powder, and in the place of this constructed habitation grows dark, sinewy trees, connected at the root and by their branches. They grow tall.

Atop one of the trees, like a Christmas ornament, Marjorie Crim's head.

Through her eyes, Brawn surveys their kingdom.


Rook

Room of Screens

Somebody


# Somebody

Frank’s All-Night Eatery is actually a stand-in for a truck-stop that serves really terrible pies. I’m here again tonight. There’s half a piece of some wicked custard sitting in front of me, and it’s almost five in the morning. Frank and I are the only ones in the place. He notices I’m not eating for about the tenth time, and decides this time he’s going to mouth up.

“Not hungry this morning?”

“You know what I want, Frank?”

“Not in the mood for pie, then? I got a muffin or two wrapped up in the back. Wasn’t going to bring ‘em out till later on, but if you aren’t feeling that pie I can set you up.”

“What I want, Frank, is for a lady to come walking through that door and come sit down right by me. She’ll be kinda shy, look at me like I’m more than just another animal. Don’t even have to be pretty. I’ll play it real slow, like I don’t know she didn’t pick any other spot in the whole place. We’ll get to talking and it’ll be the first real conversation I’ve had with a woman in more than a decade. Maybe nothing happens, probably she leaves and I never see her again. But that’s okay, because I already have my reason.”

Frank looks amused. “You picked the wrong time to hope for that, bucko. It’s damn near sunrise. Don’t know many girls stay up this early. Come back later, around two. We get some women in here who drive truck. Always interesting talk.”

I shake my head. He doesn’t get it.

“Sure would be nice, though. Grant you that. Why’ncha eat your pie and I’ll get you one of them muffins on me. You can imagine it’s a lady.”

“I’ve eaten the last pie I’m going to eat. Would have been nice to go out on a winner, but I guess it doesn’t matter much. My father used to tell me it all ends up in the same place, and he was right. I’m going there too.”

Frank was emptying the register, something he always did at five.

“No muffin?”

“Eaten my last one of those, too.”

Maybe then he got it. He stopped doing what he was doing, and looked at me hard. Cocked his head. “You ain’t talking about…what I think you’re talking about.”

“You mean killing myself? Ending my life? Suicide? Those are it.”

“You can’t do that. You don’t got it so bad. Plenty of things to live for, even if there isn’t a girl coming in here. Besides, you’re one of my best customers.”

“Frank, where am I from?”

He doesn’t say anything.

“Where did I grow up? Go to school? Who was my first love, my first wife? My kids? Why don’t they want me in their lives? Why are my parents dead? Don’t give me some stock line about things to live for. If you knew me, you wouldn’t have said it.”

He looks down.

“Listen, it’s okay. It’s just the way things are. You’ve been there. I could have talked to you if I wanted to. Here.” I pulled out my wallet. “How much for the pie?” He waved his hand, and I could see there were tears in his eyes. I thought there might be some in mine too, but it seemed I’d already done that for the last time too. I pulled all the money out of my wallet and put it on the bar. I put the wallet beside it.

“You can give that to the police. Tell them I walked to the reservoir.”

I get up. When I get to the door, Frank tries to say something. I wait for him to get it out.

“Why did you tell me this?”

“Had to say goodbye. To somebody.”


Sputnik


# Sputnik

It’s my last night in New York City. Tomorrow, my flight out of JFK will be delayed more than an hour, and I’ll miss my connection. It’ll be the first of many nights I spend in Detroit. I don’t know that yet. I have thirty-eight dollars in my wallet.

The bar I’m at, called Sputnik, after the Russian satellite, is cozy and lacking in patronage. I’m here with a friend of yours, and I’m drunk. The others we’ve invited aren’t here. They won’t be. The waiter spends time making awkward conversation and trading quips with us. He’s got a full facial beard, and he is funny.

By the time I get to Detroit and realize I’ve lost all my credit cards, I won’t remember any of his jokes. Toward the end of the night I draw a picture on a napkin and slur at him about putting it on the wall. He tells me I’m an accomplished artist, with work in a Brooklyn establishment. I tell him the fries were greasy and that one cup of ketchup wasn’t nearly enough.

The girl I’m with is getting more drunk, and I wonder why I thought Sangria was anything other than fruity wine. I ordered a pitcher of it. Wine, I was always fairly sure, came in bottles. Still, my sips have gotten smaller over the course of the evening, and hers have become slurps. Gulps. Barely a hundred pounds, this girl, and it’s hitting her hard. The conversation has devolved into status updates and whining exclamations.

I think about my visit to Coney Island, and compare it to the last two times I went to the beach. In Chicago, the sand was wet and flat, the people bunched together according to ethnicity. There’s a carnival atmosphere. Vendors scoot through, children and adults play abridged versions of baseball and soccer on improvised fields the size of tennis courts.

I stand there in pants and a sweatshirt, hoping nobody looks at you. Comes up to me and asks, in a voice I can barely hear, “why are you here?” But _why shouldn’t I be here?_

I stand around a minute or two more, until the nervous knot in your gut punches your ribcage, and then you leave. Pull the bike off the fence and ride home, angry at yourself for letting anyone get the best of you.

I think about the time before that, in Michigan. I got lost in the woods on the other side of the dune. I spent hours running up and down yelling for my dad while both of us tried to figure a way to find each other from opposite ends of a telephone call.

I sweat through my clothes, and later, as I walk along the shoreline with my shoes off I’m glad you got lost. It was an adventure to wonder, even for a moment, if you might never find a way out. If the only way I’d ever talk to anyone again was on a dying phone.

“He’s gone,” the police would tell my parents, “but at least you can say goodbye. Be glad. He might survive out there, but he’ll never find his way out, and we’ll never find our way in.”

“Hurry it up,” the cop says, “I’ve only got one bar of battery left, and I want to save it for later.”

The sand on Lake Michigan beaches squeaks under our feet like a party of dead mice as you walk.

My father tells you about an idea he has for a movie, where a serial killer has started killing all the movie stars, and you discuss how much you’d have to pay Bruce Willis to play himself as the one who discovers the plot and must overcome the fact that he’s simply an actor.

I tell him it’s a good idea.

That was in Michigan.

In New York we wait for another train. It’s the same every time. People look at us, but more often they look away. Nobody smiles.

A man dances and snaps his fingers to an imaginary beat, bobbing his head to music you can’t hear. He has no headphones, but he’s enjoying himself, and I'm jealous.

The train comes, but it’s not ours. A woman gets on, skittishly attempts to exit, but the door closes and she is resigned to whatever fate the tracks bring her. Across the tracks, a man sits by himself, reading propaganda.

In Detroit I’ll run out of money. I won’t have my credit card. Chicago will seem so much further than it does even now, at Sputnik, with the girl, both of us drunk on Sangria. I don’t know this yet.

Tonight, intact with possibility, is all there is.


Squirreled Away

The Cake


# The Cake

Dear Father,

It is now September. For the past five months I feared you were choosing not to respond to my many letters, that you had opened them, read my words and chose out of some sense of duty to my husband, or the institution of this marriage, to be silent. I thought from your perspective a response was some admission of failure in choosing for me a decent husband. I know now your silence meant nothing.

A week ago Saturday I found the letters I wrote you, hidden inside Adolfo's piano. Torn from their envelopes, creased and crumpled, turned gray by his oily fingers. I wonder why he kept them a secret from me—if ever there is anything for which he feels I should be punished, he follows through.

As you have not received any letters, I don't want to arouse more suspicion through the post than I need to, however following this letter you shall in short order receive the others, each detailing a week or so of my atrocious life.

I will summarize the outcome of events in those letters, omitting much detail.

I became pregnant in May. In June, I wanted to see a doctor but Adolfo wouldn't let me. In July, he allowed a doctor to come by the house privately and touch me with a stethoscope. The doctor heard two heartbeats aside from mine. Adolfo and I were the would-be parents of twins.

My husband was happy at first, or seemed so in the presence of the doctor. When the doctor left, Adolfo paced the room. He questioned himself, and me, fixating on the twins. He latched at first to the fear the twins wouldn't be identical. If they weren’t, did that mean I had found another man? Would my babies reveal my supposed infidelity?

I told him no, no, he was my only love, I had taken no other. He seemed to accept this, but his mood had darkened.

In the days that followed, Adolfo soured towards me, commenting how I would now cost more in mouths to feed than he had expected or wanted.He took to drinking late into the night, pounding the keys of his piano. What he produced was not music, but a deeply discordant and unsettling cacophony that prevented sleep.

I have felt deep and justified fear of my husband at times. The love I felt for him existed only on the surface. Performing this love felt artificial when expected of me and futile when given freely. Was he violent? Did he plot at how to cause me harm? I could have prepared for such a man. This one was apathetic. I feared him because I knew he could not care for me or anyone who invaded or threatened his precious sense of self.

On a Wednesday in August, Adolfo realized he didn't have one of the ingredients for the dinner he was making us. He told me he needed me to go to the store, though it was dark and I was pregnant. I told him I couldn't go and furthermore, it was something he could do.

He boxed me in the ribs and in the stomach for talking back, shouting at me while I screamed, telling me I was the cause of his misery and pain.

Before the next doctor visit I already knew one of the twins was dead. I was terrified to tell Adolfo. What if he thought to kill the other as well?

His further offenses against me are listed in detail in the letters to follow.

Tomorrow, I'll go to market for him, as he is not able. I'll buy leaks and carrots and potatoes for his soup, a chicken. Eggs, even, if I want.

Now, I must tell you of the thing you certainly need to know: the wonderful event which has turned both the fortunes of my husband and myself.

The evening before yesterday Adolfo ordered me to bake him a chocolate cake. I told him we didn't have the eggs for it, but he wouldn't hear me. I was to make the cake, or else. So I attempted it without eggs. I considered feeding him something to stop his breath, and racked my brain for what I could put in a cake to cause such an outcome. I thought of nothing, and baked the cake.

When I pulled it from the oven, the cake was flat and wet, riddled with pools and pockets of oil. I put it under a length of cheesecloth and hid it in the dark, on a shelf in the pantry. This cake, I worried, would be the death of my remaining child.

After Adolfo finished his supper the next day, he demanded the cake. I put it before him and cut him a piece. He ate a bite, then spit it out. I knew at once I was in for trouble. I tried to tell him there weren’t enough eggs and he didn’t let me go to market to get any. It didn't help.

I shielded my belly from his blows. He boxed my cheeks, my ears. I stumbled about the kitchen like a performer on stilts, finally throwing myself on the handle of the cellar door. He came at me with the cake, meaning perhaps to throw it on me, covering me with chocolate before continuing my beating. But father, no more needs to be said. None of it happened that way.

The cake slipped from Adolfo’s hands and splashed to the floor, and he slipped on it. He fell headlong toward me and the open cellar door, clutching for me, grasping nothing but air as I stepped aside. He went down the stairwell headfirst. I stood there, stunned, expecting him to rise from the dark and come at me with renewed vigor, but he didn't. I stood there for minutes before I had the courage to go down the stairs.

He didn't move. I thought he might be dead, but when I checked his throat for breath and heartbeat he had both. His eyes opened and closed and tracked movement, so I determined he was conscious. Conscious but _paralyzed._

For the first moment since my wedding night I felt I might be suited for marriage after all.

I pulled him up the stairs by his ankles, one heave after another. When he was flat on the kitchen floor, I paused to drink a glass of water, then dragged him to the bedroom.

He cursed me with his eyes. I saw a desire to put hands on me that his body refused.

I left him on the floor in the bedroom and went to the backyard with a book, where I sat and read, peacefully until the sun went down and I recovered some strength.

I lit a candle and went to the room, where I stood over him, looking him in the eye. After a time his eyes found a target just beyond me. I pulled him up, my arms behind his shoulders, and put him in bed. I put a cup of water to his lips and he drank, but he couldn't speak. I mashed an apple and forced it down his throat. I cleaned him when he pissed himself.

I'll take care of him this way, feed him and change him like a newborn. My husband, still. In his sock drawer I found money and documents. I have, without knowing, been the wife of a wealthy man. Now I remain so, with the means for us to continue living like a wealthy family. My husband and I, and your remaining unborn grandchild. Perhaps its grandfather as well?

Visit soon, and taste the new cake I've learned to bake. It's delicious, even cold.

With love, your daughter,

Natalya


The Suit Coat

The Wine Trap Family


# The Wine Trap Family

Some nights I still awaken in the dark, feeling numb, damp sheets clutched in my sweaty hands, no say in what warbling vibrations escape my throat. No control over my tongue. I scream without wanting to, and I whimper without knowing.

The nightmare is familiar too: in it, I watch my family die, one  by one, as I fail to stop it from happening.

It was worse growing up. More real, more traumatic than any waking moment. I remember running into my parents’ room, diving into bed between my mom and dad, jarring them out of a dead sleep to tell them they just died in mine. To tell them I saw them die, and how.

As a child I couldn’t differentiate between the realities I saw with my eyes open and mind awake, ears catching vibrations from all around me — and the eyes closed realities, worlds inside my head that felt and seemed so real, so detailed and intricate that they still strike me as unlikely to be random hallucinations of a brain doused with a cocktail of chemicals.

“It didn’t happen, Paul. There was no well. We didn’t die.”

I’d describe to them the flower shop, the creek with the big rocks, and the well. I’d describe how they died, while hyperventilating, while sweating, unable to believe what I saw was just some conjuration of my sleeping brain.

Over the next years I had the dream every few weeks. While I knew it wasn’t real, I still fled to my parents’ bed.

By thirteen, I’d stopped having the dream. For thirty years I lived free of the horror. I forgot the details of it, forgot how it ruled me, how I stayed up reading to stave off the nightmare, how when I slept it was with lights on and door open. I grew up, moved out, got a job pushing lines of code, and made enough to live in my own house, alone.

On Halloween, the night before my forty-fourth birthday, the dream came back.

Something else came back, too.

Appearing only on work calls, and with groceries ordered in, I let my hair grow long. My physique tumbled out of shape. I worked too much and my brain was numb and I focused on paying rent, feeding my cat, and getting sleep at night. I felt like a zombie—heck, I looked like one. So, when October rolled around and people started asking what I’d do for my birthday, or if they could invite me to a party as an honored guest, I couldn't help but feel warm. _These people want me around,_ I’d catch myself thinking. _They think I'm worth hanging out with outside of work._

Being noticed and celebrated snaps me out of it, wakes me up. I look around and see how I’ve been living. It’s not pretty.

Through poor habits and a lax attitude about trash, I’ve created an ecosystem in which several dozen fruit flies thrive. A coworker suggests I set up a wine trap. A wine trap is a bottle of wine with saran wrap rubber banded over the opening, holes poked. The fruit fly, attracted to the wine, lands on the cellophane and crawls through the holes seeking the source of the smell. It needs to get out, but it can't. It slips, falls, and eventually dies, drowning in intoxicating death.

I’m on a deadline, so I set up a wine trap and forget about it.

In scrambling to get ready for my birthday parties, I start looking at myself in the mirror the way I imagine other people look at me. I decide to change certain things. I go for a haircut and it's been so long I don't know what to ask for. I’m less productive at work preparing for these parties, but for some reason I don’t care, and I don’t care who knows I don’t care. I'm also depressed and sad and dead set on not admitting it to myself or anyone else.

So it's Halloween. I've procrastinated with a focus on an event the night following Halloween that I have done nothing to prepare for trick-or-treaters. I'm embarrassed over and over again as trick-or-treaters ring my bell and bang my knocker and I open the door with nothing. Finally, hoping to escape the shame, I put up a sign and turn out the lights.

I see the shape of a wine bottle in the dark of the living room, the one with the saran wrap tied around the top with a rubber band. The wine trap. 

It’s been weeks since I set it up, or thought about it.

I pull the saran wrap off the bottle and look inside, seeing a froth of tiny bodies collected on the surface of the liquid. So it had worked, as promised: the fruit flies crawled in and got drunk, and trapped, and died. I poured the wine down the sink, thinking of the flies, following each other one by one into the opening, and now being flushed down the drain together, lifeless. I killed them so easily, I hadn’t even noticed I did it.

I lay on the couch and dream the dream I haven't had since I was a child. Here’s how it goes: I’m with my family and my extended family at a small town flower shop with a well out front. We pile out of our vans and approach the front of the store. I'm smaller than everyone else, everyone else is an adult and I'm probably three years old. As we come to the door someone, I think my father, turns, kneels and tells me “stay out here,”  and though I want to disobey, follow them into the flower shop, I don't. I stop where I'm at. 

I wait, alone.

After a while someone comes out of the flower shop. Nobody from my family or my extended family, just a teen girl who’s purchased a bag of items. A teen girl who walks to the well and looks over the cobbled edge into the supported column of nothing. She looks at me.

 "Oh, hello, little boy!," she says. "They left you out here by yourself, huh? Hey, did you see? The bucket in this well is broken!”

She leans over and reaches into it, I guess for the broken bucket, then her legs are in the sky and she disappears down the well. I freeze where I stand. My hand dangles in the horizon of my vision, my finger extended as I point. 

Adults, some from my family, some I didn’t know, stream from the flower shop. I'm yelling but I can’t hear myself. An adult climbs the wall of the well, to reach into it for the girl— 

—and disappears down the well himself. 

More panicked adults sprint to the well and, grabbing for each other, disappear into it. My uncle, my dad. My aunt, my mom tries to save her and falls in. Other people in the shop, the shopkeeper, the employees. Gone, just like that. Screaming, they each disappear, and I’m alone. With nobody left to hear my cries or dry my tears, I toddle to the well. I climb up the side, and peer into the inky black.

As a kid, I’d wake up about now, shivering in sweated-through pajamas. This time, it’s not over. I see a long drop and a splash of glinting lights spiraling and pinwheeling in the distance.

_Is my family down here? What is that sweet smell?_

Leaning forward, I lose my grip, and drop to my death.

I awake in an almost fourty-four-year-old body to another round of trick-or-treaters, who’ve ignored the sign and the doused lights and are gathered on my porch waiting for candy. I have none.

I open the door, and a family of fruit flies stands out there. Ten of them. Fifteen.

“Sorry, no candy this year, I…”

They come through the door, I can’t stop them.   Behind them, a small fly, maybe three days old, stands and points at me, mouth open, buzzing.

This is Just to Say


# This is Just To Say

I’m hiding in a bush outside a house in Rutherford, New Jersey, on the evening of March 11th, 1952. It's cold. The wind is swiping the siding behind me and moving the dirt beneath me. Wooden slats breathe and shift against each other like the scales of a snake.

Tucked between my rib and my armpit is a book, wrapped in a bag.

The bush I’m in is a fir. Brambles the texture of barbed wire are wreathed around my neck. It isn’t the worst I’ve had to go through for work, but it’s close.

I'm waiting for a man named Ginsberg to open the front door, yell back inside some kind of goodbye, walk to his car and drive away.

That's when I'll complete my delivery.

Ginsberg will write about tonight in a diary entry. He’ll date it March 11, 1952. This is the house, owned by a Mr. Williams. There are cars parked on the street. There isn't much going on inside the house at the moment, if anything. I'm starting to think it may be empty. So far the only observable moments of interest have been around the rest of the neighborhood.

Across the street, six minutes ago, a garage door opened and a woman stood there, rearranging items on a shelf.

She looked out the open door, squinting into the light, and at once I had the feeling—the certainty—that she could see me, that she was making eye contact with me. But I know that isn’t possible. I'm wearing a fully—integrated lightsuit, local proximity cloaking enabled.

Five and three quarters minutes ago, a man drove a car into the driveway and parked in the garage. He got out, gave the woman a kiss on the cheek, and the garage door closed.

They didn’t see me.

I'm wondering if the date in the book was written down the same night or made up by Ginsberg _ex post facto_, which might mean I’m at the wrong date altogether.

There's always a chance. History is like that sometimes, in my experience. My own memory for dates and locations after the fact isn't good at all, approximations are the best I can do.

A young boy on roller skates goes by, pulled by a dog, a golden retriever. I'm impressed, because it's dark, and because roller skates are impossible to use.

Nobody from my time can use them.

From behind me, I hear the voices of two men nearing the front of the house. One of them opens the door, steps out, turns back, and says into the opening, "and I'll say hi to Jack for you."

“Yes, that would be nice. He's always somewhere,” comes the reply from Williams inside. The door shuts again.

The man leaving, who I’m assuming must be Ginsberg, shuffles down the walk to his car, gets in, fumbles around for thirty seconds, starts the car and drives off.

I wait another minute or two, and now it's time for me to deliver my package.

In 1952, doorbells are the norm, but one doesn’t seem to be installed in this house. Meaning I have to knock, in a way natural to people of the period. This makes me nervous. My therapist says it’s neurosociotemporal anxiety, common in this line of work. I am a nervous system out of time attempting to interact with other nervous systems in time.

My anxiety is compounded because this delivery is different.

In order to knock on the door, I would normally have to strictly adhere to temporal normality rules. I'd have to go behind the house, hop over the fence, go through the neighbor's yard to the next street, walk a distance down, find a safe place to extinguish my proximity cloak, change into an appropriate outfit and walk the block and a half back to the recipient’s door.

I won't be doing any of that this time.

This is my first “high profile” delivery. This one, the sender doesn't want anything observed—nothing on record. I'm to engage in what's called 'stealth protocol yellow'.

I take some deep breaths. I’m ready.

I come out of the bush and go up the steps. I knock on the door. When Williams opens it, I won't be standing there, not to an eye as-yet untrained by decades upon decades of game graphics, multidimensional films, and mixed reality implants.

This is what happens. He opens the door. He looks out into the night. He sees nobody, but of course I’m standing there.

I step forward, through the opening and into the man, pushing him aside. He stumbles back but steadies himself.

“William Williams?”

I shut the door behind me. The man cowers, clutching his chest. He gasps, he hisses.

“Devilry!”

I extinguish my proximity cloak and stand before him, unassuming but for my uniform and a protective stance.

“It's not devilry, it's delivery,” I say. “I’m a delivery guy from the future. I think that's the correct terminology. Maybe it’s delivery _chap?_”

“The future?” Williams gulps like a fish.

“Yeah, the future. Pretend it's a company you’ve never heard of if that makes it easier to think about.”

From his coiled energy I can see Williams is still deciding whether to attempt to rush me. I know he won’t, not because I’m from the future, but because he’s a poet.

He says nothing.

I clear my throat.

“What am I delivering, you might ask? Mr. Williams?”

“What? Yes. Uh, what are you delivering? Wait, no, you're in my house—you shouldn't be here! I don't care how...how _invisible_ you are sometimes.”

“Hidden is a better way to describe it. But now I’m not hidden. You are the only entity at this cross-section authorized to see me. That’s some small print.”

“Well then,” Williams said, considering, “I’ll push you out the front door again and you'll have to hide.”

“I couldn't allow you to remove me from the premises. Would you like to know what I'm delivering?”

Williams stands there looking at me.

"Well," he eventually says, flinging his hands at me. "Get on with it."

I pull out the book, and hand it to him still wrapped. He's got to open it, that’s one of the conditions.

“It's a book,” I say.

“Okay? It's a book from the future, and you want me to open it? Why does that strike me as wrong? Unsafe somehow. Not that I believe any of this.”

“Everybody asks that. Not to worry, there's nothing about this delivery that will change history in any substantive way. It's a job, and while I can't cosign the intent of the delivery or vouch for its contents, what I _can_ do is deliver it. I've only to make note of your reaction, and I'll be on my way.”

“What do you mean, make note of my reaction?”

I gesture at the book.

“Nobody reads these anymore. But a lot of people have read this one.”

“Look, if you broke in here to give me a bible…”

“It’s not a bible. It’s something else, specifically meant for you. You're to open it and see what it says. Flip through. React to what you see."

Williams begins to unwrap the book. He tears the top right and top left, then pulls the book from the casing. It's bright red, leather-bound and in the center, stamped in gold plated letters, are the words "This is Just To Say."

"I..." He doesn’t finish the sentence. I can see the gears in his head turning. I can see him reaching into his guts for the fortitude to get through this moment, knowing something is profoundly wrong.

"Open it."

"Yes, of course."

I record all of this, I can't help but do it. My lightsuit automatically records everything with four-dimensional reconstructive fidelity. The sender will be able to relive this moment, once or as many times as he wants, from any angle, any perspective.

The book is open, the flustered Williams is flipping through the pages. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. Finally he looks up at me, his face the color of a tomato, drops of sweat appearing on his temples and on his neck. He's trembling, he’s having a hard time standing straight up.

I hope his reaction is sufficient for the sender.

“This poem isn't even published!” Williams says. “I wrote this twenty years ago!"

“It's published in a decade or so," I tell him. "Your friends, I think one just left, your friends convince you. It becomes the most well-known poem, even if...the format..."

He's not listening to me. He's staring at the book. Still flipping.

“What kind of abomination—is this a joke? Is this how you in the future deal with dead writers? Turn their words into... I can't even classify this. What simpleton thinks this derivative...thinks this parody, no, this _perversion_ is worthy of fruition? Who wrote this?"

"A lot of people will write it. In the 21st century, your poem is one of the more participatory instances of something called a 'meme’, which means a virally transmitted idea. The man who coins the term is a child at this time, and the technology along which these ideas travel hasn't been thought of yet.”

My lightsuit tightens around my throat, preventing me from saying more. It’s for protection, to keep reality in check - suppose I mention the boy’s name and this poet goes off in search of him? However unlikely that eventuality, _stealth code yellow_.

“When you say a lot of people, how many is that?”

“Almost everyone at some point seems to write a version of this poem. Millions of people. Millions of poems more than could fit in a book.“

I see him trying to climb this mental hill, try to see if it is something he can manage. It doesn't last. His shoulders slump, his eyes scan the floor.

“What of the rest of it? My novels? The collections? My career as a doctor? Do they know any of it?”

“The plums in the icebox poem, and parodies of it. That’s how you survive in the social consciousness. I don't think people are aware you were a doctor. I wasn’t.”

This uncovering, this revelation—it seems to destroy him. Rips into him, invalidates him. I watch an ego wrapped in a nervous system shrivel up like a salted slug. Whatever multidimensional man this had been was now wholly reduced—by a book of jokes.

The future has reached back to laugh at William Carlos Williams.

“I have delivered the poems that were in the future,” I say, “and which you are probably wishing were never written.”

I don't want to say any of this, but the sender paid for it as a delivery condition.

“Forgive me, it was delicious. So sweet and so cold.”

Now I’m leaving.

I’m leaving now.

---

I open my eyes. I'm back in the sender’s time, in Rutherford, New Jersey.

I’m waiting for my body to stop buzzing, for my lightsuit to finish pulling all of the strands of me back together.

I start a call. The sender answers, standing before me, looking impatient.

“You got it?”

He means payment for the delivery. It's already in my account, I can read the notifications - down and to the right of my vision. I swipe them away.

"Funds received.”

"Good. Video’s transferring?"

"Transfer initiated."

A moment goes by before he has it, the seed from which to reconstruct everything I’ve just experienced.

“Thank you again,” I say, “For using Jack of All Times Courier Services.”

The sender nods, already forgetting I’m there. He ends the call. I’m alone.

It's abrupt, and his callous informality bothers me. I want to call back and say “This was wrong. We were wrong for this.”

I want to make him feel the same way the poet felt, small, insignificant, a footnote in time, a joke.

Of course I don’t turn around, I don’t go back. I have another delivery, another client.

I’m a Jack.

It’s how I survive.


Those Last Early Hours


# Those Last Early Hours

Three months after the doctors told me I was going to die, I met you. That all-night diner off the highway. Jack’s. One of my places when the world is sleeping, in the early hours when eyes are reddest, coffee thickest.

You looked radiant.

Remember? It was pouring. You walked in out of the rain. The place was empty but for us, the waitress and the shift cook. You asked me if you could sit in my booth, then asked my name.

“Marx,” I said. I waited for the usual question, for you to laugh and say, “Like the brothers? Or the socialist?” but you just nodded and squeezed the rain from your hair.

“I’ve seen you here before,” you said. You may have. I thought about the nights I spent alone, a prisoner in my mind while everyone else gets a reprieve. I thought about Doctor Whitehearse, the little man with a leg shorter than the other. The way he furrowed his brow and told me all that extra time awake was about to catch up to me. 

I’d started having seizures, my death knell.

“I don’t sleep much," I told you. "This is one of my night places.” I molded over the corners of my reality with a lie, to keep the sharp truth from you.

The truth is I haven’t slept since I was born. Some crossed wire in my brain, some mutation. It’s why I feel so old at twenty-six. Living a block of time like that all at once, it isn’t normal. I often wonder who I’d be if I could sleep. If I hadn’t collected more waking moments than most forty-year-olds. 

I didn’t say any of that to you.

“How about you,” I said. “You look like you’re coming from a party.”

“It was a ridiculous get together, and the man I went with…” She shook her head. “He’s a pig. I came here for a slice of pie. I’d rather not eat alone, if you’re sticking around.”

“I’m in no hurry to get anywhere. What was your name?”

“Amanda. But maybe tonight I’d rather be a Miranda, or an Elizabeth.”

“Oh, never an Elizabeth.”

“A Miranda then.”

“Amanda. A wonderful name.” You smiled so wide. A grin tickled at the corners of my mouth.

You ordered apple pie with a bowl of whipped cream on the side. I sipped at coffee. We talked about poetry, and the decline of modern art. Pleasant conversation, made moreso because I hadn’t expected it. I fell in love while your hair dried, while our wits danced over and through the other’s like dragonflies in the rain.

I had to pee.

“Eliot next, when I return," I said. "Prufrock and his love song.”

You winked at me. I toddled to the restroom, elated. Hummed a tune as I urinated. Washing my hands, I saw in mirror me’s face something I hadn’t since I was a boy: hope. Now, as I was dying. I think I even laughed.

A step from the door, as I was about to grab the handle, the seizure came. It threw me to the floor and beat my head against the tile, jaw clenched as blood and saliva escaped the gaps in my teeth. I fought to breathe, to keep from hitting my head on the pipes under the sink. My body writhed under a wave of electric pain, for minutes that stretched far longer.

My seizures weren’t mild, and though they’d only started three months before, the first were children compared to this monstrosity. I burned alive in the bathroom. I thanked God for the door, that obstacle between us. If you'd seen me like that I'd have lost you to pity. 

When it ended I lay on the cold tile panting, sucking air. Tears of relief ran down my nose, diluting the sticky red on the floor. 

I came out of the bathroom, weak and sweat-soaked, looking like I’d taken on a boxing team. Daylight was streaming through the windows. Cars outside, two customers with heads buried in plates of greasy food, one at the bar and one in the booth where I left you. 

You were gone. 

The waitress, seeing me, rushed over. “Oh my God, what happened to you? I thought you left!”

I waved a hand. It was too late, I wasn’t going to spend my remaining minutes on the planet explaining myself.

“The woman I was with. When did she leave? Did she say anything?”

The waitress’s mouth hung open like a bear trap. Her eyes vibrated wildly over my body. “Oh my God,” she said again.

“The woman who was here with me.”

“What? Oh. She left. But she left—” The waitress reached into her apron and pulled out a napkin smeared with blue ink. “—this for you.”

I took it from her and moved toward the door.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to call anybody, you really don’t look--”

The door closed behind me. The morning air was a warm breath on my neck. I shuffled to my car, feeling the indent of your writing on the napkin between my fingers. When I was behind the wheel with the door closed I read it.

“I couldn’t wait," you wrote. "Thank you for the companionship and the conversation.” Under that you left a number, and another scribble. “Please do call. Something different about you.”

I drove to the hospital. They scanned my head and called Dr. Whitehearse. He limped into his office and sat down, dropping printouts on his desk and giving me a look.

“I’m afraid it’s less time than we originally thought, Marx. A week at this point. Maybe less. Two more like that will kill you. One might be enough. I’d like to keep you here for observation.”

“I have a week to live and you want me to stay here?”

Whitehearse looked concerned, then gave a smile. “Of course not. I wouldn’t either. Go, get out. Live while you can. But do me a favor, would you? Don’t drive.”

I left my car at the hospital and got a ride home. I made myself a sandwich. I watched a film and decided I should get on a plane and visit my parents. Say goodbye. My fingers traced your writing. I thought about calling. To say what? Tell you I’m dying? That I want to spend my last hours with you? Pretend nothing's wrong?

I booked a flight to Florida, where my parents live. In a bag I put six changes of clothes, my toothbrush and some shampoo. 

I tucked your napkin in the side pocket.

"If I live eight days," I told myself, "I’ll call you."

It’s been seven. Tomorrow I’ll hear your voice or dream it. 

Either way, it will be good to finally sleep.

*****

"Hello?"

"Hello, is this Amanda?"

"Yeah, sorry, who’s this?"

"Apologies for calling so late. I ran into you recently, sort of a chance meeting, and fleeting. I wondered if we could have the next bit of our conversation."

"I do recognize your voice...Marx?"

"Is the evening spread out against the sky?"

"It is."

"Let us go then, you and I, and to omit some lines--do I dare, disturb the universe?"

I hear you laugh, through the phone. You say, "In a minute there is time, for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.""To be short, I am afraid."

"Eat the peach. Squeeze the universe into a ball. Above all, be glad you called."

"I am. I am."

And that is all.


Time Consuming Lester Battle


# Time Consuming Lester Battle

One disappointing thing about Lester Battle’s poverty is his inability to keep hold of loose change. Yesterday, at the Ogilvie Metra station, he had to turn out all six pockets before the last nickel needed to complete the 2.35 fare to Ravenswood showed itself.

When he awakes in seven minutes, he’ll roll off the mattress and realize the same thing he realized last night, before chewing his nails in the dark and listening to his belly.

What he'll realize again is this: he doesn’t have two dollars for today’s commute downtown. He doesn’t have two dollars anywhere. His change sock is limp, the only trace of its use a green patina left by pennies long spent. He’ll check it anyway, in the bottom drawer of his desk, his hand coming away greasy and smelling of metal, fabric-softener and sweaty fungus.

That is all seven minutes away. For now, he is asleep.

Yesterday, Lester Battle pulled a twenty dollar bill from an ATM machine. Following that, he touched YES on the keypad. At once he began to sweat, and the soup in his gut churned like it had when he’d gotten his grades at DePaul. YES was not what he'd meant to touch. He’d just told the machine that he wanted a piece of paper with several numbers on it. Numbers he’d avoided looking at for almost three months.

The paper with the numbers on it rolled out. The numbers told him he had seventeen cents left in his checking account, and that his savings account was empty. The twenty dollar bill in his hand was the last bit of money he had.

All of this meant he would have to get the job. So yesterday, Lester put everything he had - all seventeen metaphorical cents - into the interview.

The three men had looked at him, told him they’d enjoyed his presentation (as always), and that he should return for a follow-up interview today at the same time.

“Go out and tell Jim we’re ready for him.”

The opening was a creative engineering position with a company called LPaso, based out of Texas. The position had come about when the engineer previously filling it had talked his body into throwing itself onto the third rail of an elevated train. Lester heard about this from a friend, one of the four or five people in Chicago he had any kind of relationship with.

That man’s name was Jim, and he’d been interviewing for the same position every day, excluding weekends, alongside Lester. The controlling interest in the firm, three creative engineers themselves, had pared the field down to two in a week-long process, one that had Lester feeling close to victory, and some sort of stability.

That had been five months ago.

Yesterday, Lester left the interview room exhausted and demoralized. It was a state he’d grown used to. He’d worked up a sweat again, trying this time to perfect his words with a pinwheel of activity. He smiled in what he hoped was a contagious way, but the three men watched impassively. He threw his arms along with his enunciations, swirling them into motions meant to illustrate and then persuade.

The routine was familiar; he put all of it at the front of his brain while he receded behind to watch. He was a television show that had been recorded long ago, and his body was the screen. Sitting quietly in the back of his mind while his body gesticulated he had pondered two pigeons he’d seen at the Clyborn Metra stop, as sleepy travelers boarded. The pigeons lived atop the roof of a building, one of them elevated on a bit of duct work. The other one paced back and forth in front of it, pleading.

> _Come down, won’t you?_

> _I have business up here. I’m closer to the sky. The world isn’t so gray._

> _Don’t you love me anymore?_

By and by his body stopped its enunciating, and the interview was over once again. He stopped watching the pigeons and retook control of his body. The three men were staring at him impassively.

“We enjoyed your presentation as always, Mr. Battle. Go out and tell Jim we’re ready for him.”

Jim was sitting alone in the waiting room. The waiting room was a small cube of white with one black chair and three doors. The chair sat against the only empty wall, and sitting in it one could imagine his future through any of the three symbols of opportunity, as long as one of the futures involved vomiting to death in a toilet. The room became a part of you after a while. Sometimes when Lester receded into the back of his mind he sat in the room, but never while he was physically present. It was the same with Jim - who had told him of a dream he’d had about the toilet door, which sat opposite the chair.

“I’m sitting there,” he’d said, and this had been in the first month of interviews, when both of them had still been young and optimistic, “I’m sitting in that room in my dream and the door across from me opens and a man dressed as a nurse comes out and says, ‘Hello Jim, the doctor will see you now.’ He goes back through the door and I get up, realizing there must be something wrong with me that I’m at a doctor’s office, and I follow him. Inside the room is the toilet from LPaso. It’s wearing a stethoscope.” The two men rarely told stories anymore.  Yesterday, in the waiting room, Lester nodded at Jim, and the other man - who was wearing a tweed suit that had been patched several times and whose face was obscured by a cyclone of beard - nodded back.

“Go for a beer after?” Jim said.

They often went for a beer after. Whoever got out first met the other across the street, at a bar called the Thirsty Genius. Yesterday, in the waiting room, it was just another routine. In the back of his mind he was contemplating the last twenty, which had been pared to eighteen during his commute as the conductor swept through the car, furiously punching holes in differently colored pieces of rail currency. That eighteen would be cut in half after the beer (this would be Lester’s turn to pick up the tab), and he’d lose another 2.35 on the trip back. Stop this, he yelled to the screen, but the man in the rerun nodded again and walked forward, pulling the opposite door open.

Outside, the sky was dark and swirling, rain brewing in the bellies of incorporeal monsters. It started to pour, and umbrellas opened like flowers to sunlight. Lester kept his head down and sprinted across the street, feeling the water already leaking up through the holes in his shoe-bottoms. He waited for several important-looking women on cell phones to pass and then he pulled open the door to the Genius and was breathed inside.

The Thirsty Genius is a themed bar with a reading room occupied by six large leather reading chairs and a bookcase filled with literature. Most of the bar’s flooring is tile, but the reading room is carpeted a dark red. There were three men in there, all of them dressed in suits and sipping whiskey in the leather chairs. Lester sat on a stool at the bar.

The bartender, whose name is Adam, glanced at him, nodding. Lester nodded at the nod. This is the currency of male interaction. It is the signal that more varied and interesting conversation is not needed, that all of the usual things are a given. It’s a hard life, and we’re all in this together, and one of us may be in a better place than the other right now but that can change, will inevitably change, and back again, and all we need to do at this moment is acknowledge the existence of the other. Adam brought him a beer glass, empty, and looked at Lester. Lester nodded. He would drink.

The glass filled.

Lester unfilled it.

The clock on the wall had no second hand, but the minute hand clicked along twenty-five times. Jim walked into the place. He sat on Lester's left, and nodding as he did so. Adam nodded back and came over with a beer glass. Empty.

“You get the job?” Lester said.

“I got the job.” Jim said.

It was a joyless monotone, and another routine they had with one another. How much of his existence was habit? He went on with it all unthinking, living the same day over and over – Mon, Tues, Wednes – the labels ceased to matter. It was always just Day.

“I’m not doing this tomorrow,” Jim said. This, finally, something new.  Lester felt the tingle of something like surprise, like excitement. A sweet, tangy confusion.

“What? The beer?”

“This.”

“The job?”

“I’m not coming in. Or if I am, it’s to tell them it’s over.”

“Oh.” Lester didn’t know what to do. What did it mean? Would he get the job if he did his dance for one more day?

“I ran out of money a month ago, Les. I’ve been going on credit. I had three hundred left before my limit, and now I’ve gone through that. All I’ve got is some cash.”

“I know.”

“You too? Christ, they’ve been stringing us along for five months. And who’s been doing the work? I had a dream last night, want to hear it? He still works there. Dead guy, mister third rail, still works there. They've got him pumping out projects. He sits at his desk with his head down, bones dragging a pencil across paper around the clock because it's all he can do to keep from rotting.”

“That’s ridiculous,”

“It’s irrelevant, is what it is. I can’t do this anymore and I’m going to use the rest of my money to buy some thermal underwear and a tent. I’ve got till the end of the month to get out of my apartment and then I’ll be homeless. And I'm going to do it smart.”

They sat quietly for several minutes, and then Lester paid for the two beers and left. Jim watched him go.

On the Metra, Lester found a spot on the upper level on a seat that folded down from the wall next to a skateboarding youth and a fat man reading a book in Cyrillic. When he levered the seat down there was considerable resistance, unlike a movie theater seat or a pew kneeler. He wondered if he were to lay across four or five seats if they would push him back up into the cold metal and pinch his face against the glass. Lester could ride like that, he’d decided. Something about the position seemed appropriate. But all these were occupied. He’d have to wait for another opportunity.

The fat man laughed, a kind of choking sniffle that kicked his skin into a body-wide ripple. Lester wondered what, in Cyrillic, could be so funny. He leaned forward and squinted at the cover of it, which was a painting of a dog wearing a bow tie. There was no title. Some things, Lester had learned, had no name but were still very important. And then there were people like him.  Fourteen minutes later he was at the counter of the CVS at Lawrence and Damen. He’d decided on two packs of Ramen noodles (.40), a bag of peanut M&M’s (1.59), and a small pouch of beef jerky for dinner (2.29) This came to 4.48, tax included, and from a five he’d received two quarters and two pennies.

“If you’d had our card,” the woman behind the counter said, and she was attractive except for a very large mole just  above and to the right of her lip, “You could have gotten another beef jerky, it was two for one.” Lester shrugged it off and took his bag, but inside he was raging at himself. For months he’d declined a card, doubting that he’d be back enough to use it, yet every time he stepped inside the pharmacy slash everything store he’d thought to himself, here I am again. How much more could he have saved, or eaten?

He walked home. The cable had been turned off. In his room, he put his head under his pillow and willed himself to sleep. Around nine he woke up, feeding himself M&M’s one after the other in steady rhythm like a slots player with a cup of nickels. He dropped a yellow one and it rolled.

At three in the morning the screams of a small girl woke him. She lives in the bedroom above his. The screams descended into a flurry of pounding feet and terrible sobs. He watched the ceiling, hoping cracks would open up and she’d drop through. He’d save her, though he was in no position for it. He’d save her. The sobs went on for half an hour and still he made no move. His heart was pounding, and there was anger there too. I’d go to her, I’d soothe her back to sleep. Her parents didn’t do this. He knew why, or supposed he did.

In his first month of living in the apartment he’d made the trip upstairs twice. The first time her father had opened the door, a small Eastern European man with eyebrows like caterpillars. Lester had stood under his stare for a full thirty seconds. Behind the little man the sobs of a small child continued.

“I live in the apartment below yours,” he’d finally said. “And I have work in the morning. Can’t you do something about...can you make your daughter stop crying?”  The man blinked. Another thirty seconds went by, and Lester began to get the feeling he was the one being asked to keep the noise down.

“Well. I’m sure you’ll do your best. Sorry to bother you.” The little man closed the door. The little girl kept crying. Lester went downstairs and brewed himself a pot of coffee.

Two nights later he’d found himself knocking on that door again. He’d worked himself up to have words with the man who took so much offense at being bothered early in the morning while his daughter to roused the rest of the building. But the little Eastern European man didn’t open the door this time. Instead it was a little Eastern European woman. She had red eyes, and looked up at him hopefully.

He’d cleared his throat. “Sorry to bother you so early. My name is Lester, and I live in the -”

“You are of the downstairs.” Her voice was tired. The little girl sobbed from somewhere in the darkness behind. “You come to see why I not fix the noise.”

“Yes.”

“We not go to her when she cry. We want it, but she not let us.”

“She doesn’t let you?”

“She cry for the suffering of all world. Say we must leave her. I am sorry to you.”

For three months he had let her wake him, had thought about that conversation. _The suffering of all world._ What did he have to complain about? Not getting the job he wanted? Just hours ago, the girl awoke him again. She cried until the suffering was no more than a dark, dull throb within the breast of the earth, and Lester let himself back under the warm eyelid of sleep.

Watch—the alarm on his phone is about to go off. His brain will be plucked from its fantasies and he’ll mouth swear words into the sunlight.

Watch - it happens just that way. His mouth tastes horrible. His eyes are hard and sticky. Lester gropes for the change sock.

In the shower he considers the bank receipt. There are seventeen cents left. With his fifty-two cents that will give him sixty-nine. He gets dressed and steps outside, where the first nibbles of autumn find his cheeks.

It is four blocks to the bank, and once there he plays the coming moment in his head. He’ll go in, stand in line, pull up to the first available teller and pass a withdrawal slip across the table. 0000.17, he’ll have written there, along with his name and his account number. He or she will look at the number and assume he’s made a mistake, say something like “Sir, did you mean to withdraw seventeen dollars?” He’ll shake his head and say, too quiet to hear at first, “No, cents,” until she makes him say it again, louder, and everyone will look over, wondering just what kind of poor this man is that he is even bothering.

He steps away from the bank and looks around. There are several cars parked along the street here, vehicles made and modeled to suit bank managers and the like. All parked at meters. Lester considers his own attire.

“Excuse me,” he says to a passing woman. “I’m short a quarter for the meter.” He waves at one of the cars, a deep black Saab. “Do you happen to have one?”

“Oh, I’m sure I must. Here.” She stops and drops a hand into a round purse, digging. It’s a quarter she pulls out. He feigns putting it into the meter, palming it instead. The woman doesn’t look back. He waits, and here come some more.

In five minutes Lester has enough for the Metra.

The waiting room at LPaso is empty. He knocks on the door to the interview room and then opens it. The three men are sitting there. Lester is late, has to be late. Jim hasn’t come at all. He takes his place in front of the room.  “So, you all know my qualifications.”  They don’t nod. Lester doesn’t move. Doesn’t recede into the back of his mind, doesn’t start his body on its daily exercise. Instead, he bows.

“Thank you. I hope to hear from you soon.” He goes to the door and opens it, and leaves. None of the three men says a thing.

There is something inside of him, a sharp cube of something that is threatening to poke its corners out. His ribs sting. There is an ocean behind his eyes, and Jim is gone. At the Genius he sits alone, and Adam buys him a drink, able to see that this man is in no position to be sober. At the base of Lester’s throat a soft clicking begins, like a windup clock.

Miles away, behind a box of books and electrical cords, ants bore holes into the shell of a yellow peanut M&M and begin their harvest of its meat.


To Whom It Must Concern


# To Whom It Must Concern

Mr. Sperry, first I'd just like to say that these last four years at Big Round Pie Marketing and Sales LLC have been quite the roller coaster. I learned a lot. I learned, above all, how to sell pies and pie tins, with cold-calling strategies and conversational tactics that apply as well for other round or semi-cylindrical objects, like steering wheels or trash cans or tires.

Secondly, I'd like to thank you for the confidence you’ve shown in me, most recently by offering me the position of General Manager of the Big Round Pie Marketing and Sales LLC Softball team. Remember pulling me aside last night as I was leaving the office? You really didn't have to do that, and shouldn't have. Probably you know this.

Before you say anything, Mr. Sperry, (you can't), I'm aware the offer wasn't a promotion. Coaching a softball team is a different job altogether. One that pays nothing. I was honored to be considered, but the real honor is mine, in saying this:

No.

No, Mr. Sperry, I will not coach your softball team. That's not all. I have a confession to make. You'll be glad you're sitting down.

I confess: four years ago when you flew me out for my interview, the man you intended to fly out wasn’t me. I don’t mean he wasn't me in a “I’ve grown up since then,” kind of way or an “I didn’t realize who I was until now,” kind of way or an “I was just a kid” kind of way. I mean that man wasn’t me because I jumped that man in the casino parking garage, grilled him about the interview, stole his suit and driver's license, tied him to a trash truck and drove it into a gorge. Next morning I got on a plane and showed up for the interview in his place.

Soon as I got here I knew this was the place for me. I had to work here. Not work in a “fingers to the bone,” or “sun-up till sun-down” kind of way, but work in a sort of “foster a culture of corruption and fear as a means to an end" kind of way.

It really has been a wonderful four years.

I can’t accept the position of office softball coach, Mr. Sperry. I hate softball. Also, you said you want to be able to pay me more than you’ve been paying me, but that's impossible. I don’t mean impossible in a “mission” kind of way or a “that looks too hard to try to figure out how to do” kind of way. I mean impossible in an “I’ve transferred all of your money into my accounts” kind of way. I used a lot of the money to buy this trash truck. Which, you might have noticed, I’ve been tying you to while narrating this letter I wrote.

_To Whom it Must Concern_, I wrote. Well, are you concerned yet, Mr. Sperry?

People will always love Big Round Pies, Mr. Sperry, and I’ve learned that as long as you put yourself in a position to be a seller of pies, the effort needed to market these pies is ridiculous. Remember last year you ran a promotion where we put prizes in the pies? People sliced through and bit and chewed up concert tickets, and the undamaged tickets' ink was smeared and unreadable? We had to throw away every pie and couldn't admit the winners to the venue. And you couldn't admit you were wrong. All because you had a picture in your head of people bobbing for tickets, like it'd be a fun game.

I'm not the guy who knows the best ways to sell things, but there's something about the way you ran Big Round Pie that moved the clock inside me, wound it up. Ticked me off. When I get ticked off I put people on a list and tick them off.

So I’ll be taking it from here, Mr. Sperry. I’ll be taking it (and this time I mean the trash truck) from here all the way up into the desert and over a cliff into a gorge. If you survive the trip, still alive tied to a trash truck at the bottom of a gorge...well, that isn't a very nice way to be still alive, is it?

I'll be the new owner and operator of Big Round Pie LLC, Mr. Sperry. You'll just be ground pie. I'm poised to step in, and other employees are poised in step behind me, and still others poised--forgive me, poisoned. Actually, don’t forgive me. I don’t deserve it.

We'll sell tires. Steering wheels. Other things people who drive trash trucks need on a regular basis. It's time I seized the means of production for the refuse community. I refuse to miss this opportunity for a pun, even in a serious situation. I haven't written a letter in years. B. There's one. O. There's another one. It's exhilarating, writing letters, not your BO. No need to be nervous, just accept it.

There may be vultures who take a passing interest in you on our way to the gorge, but they're too slow to pick on you.

Scream if you'd rather ride in the compactor.

Scratch that. Still scream, but the thing I said about vultures was misleading. We'll be going slow enough for them during most of the trip.


Trumbull Beginnings


# Trumbull Beginnings

The waiting room vibrated with nervous energy.

Chilly blank walls offered no comfort to the hopefuls, and the chairs were hard steel. A cherry office desk stood at the front of the room, guarding a metal door. The placard on the desk read “Christine Trumbull,” and sitting there admiring her nails was a gaunt white woman. Her hair was jet black, her skin unusually pale. Her lips were painted crimson, her eyes a pasty green.

Christine enjoyed her job; it provided her with all the benefits an aging single woman needed; dental, healthcare and a salary to support her bad habits. Her guilty pleasures. She’d moved again into a larger apartment, dumped tens of thousands of dollars into a high-yield account. For all the benefits, the job was simple: Christine told the applicants it was their turn to go in, and kept the others at bay until it was their turn or they left, discouraged at the length of the process.

The first week had been disorienting. She was used to doing more, but once she settled in she took to the job with an increased fervor. If a hopeful got up to ask where the bathroom was, she’d say, “There is no bathroom. You can wait until it is your turn, or you can leave.” Most often the questioner sat back down with an anxious look on his face, trying to judge how long they'd be able to hold it in.

Christine loved calling the hopefuls into the back room. Each time she called a name, the nervous energy in the room would spike, producing a pleasant tingle at the base of her spine.

“Thomas Yuergens!” she called one day. That day's applicants all jerked their heads around to look, eyes wide. Their fear washed over her. She savored it.

Thomas, bewildered and embarrassed like he'd been caught napping, pulled himself out of his metal seat and staggered up to the desk.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“It’s your turn to go in now, Mr. Yuergens.” Her voice was robotic, perfectly trained to say these exact words. She looked forward to the next part.

“Me? Now?” Yuergens, cowboy hat hiding greasy brown hair, had his mouth half open in either disbelief or stupidity. Christine motioned him closer. He bent over.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“You won’t get the job,” she whispered.

“Ma’am?”

“You’re too stupid, Mr. Yuergens. I wouldn’t trust a man like you with a John Deere tractor.”

Yuergens straightened up as if he’d been pinched somewhere unpleasant.

“Well I--” he protested, but she interrupted.

“You go right on in, then, sir. Good luck.”

The man looked at his feet. His body language had changed; he seemed half a foot shorter than before. He shuffled to the door and took a deep breath, then went through.

The time spent with applicants differed. Sometimes it would be fifteen minutes between entries, sometimes only a couple. Over the months Christine challenged herself to guess how much time each hopeful would merit.

Yuergens lasted almost no time at all.

“George Harwood!”

When he leaned in close, she told him he was too fat.

"There’s no way you'll be given this job, fitness is one of the prerequisites."

She looked into his eyes and saw she’d done it. Cast enough doubt. It was all just a psychological trick. She told them they weren't good enough for some reason or other, and they’d believe it. They’d take their momentarily mangled identity into the back room and sabotage themselves.

“You’re too old. Too weak. You can’t outrun your regrets,” she’d say on occasion.

“You have gum disease, it smells like there’s a microbial genocide going on in your mouth, I could smell it from here,” was a favorite.

“The chair won’t fit. You’re not tall enough.”

“There’s no point. You’re a dud.”

Things like that. Whispers meant to cast doubt. The applicants were here for a job; they’d waited a long time. Right before showtime, she’d strike.

Christine didn't know what was beyond the door. Whatever the position, whoever the employer, she didn’t think any name she called should have the job. She wanted them to drink bleach.

Today was Christine Trumbull’s last day. The end of her contract.

There were four people left; the first time she’d seen more than two of the seats empty. She hummed a tune of disquieting apathy, and the men in the chairs each ticked in their own nervous way. The tall black man in the chair closest to Christine stared at her, still but for the occasional upward curl of his lip that drove his expression into a snarl. Christine smiled back, enjoying that the man believed he was intimidating. Beyond his outer shell of calm, she could feel his confusion, his anger, his fear. The stink peeled off him, his brow rippling with confusion as Christine’s smile grew wider. When she called his name he'd stand promptly, showing no sign of the roiling aura surrounding him. He’d take three steps toward her and she’d beckon him closer, so that his ear hovered before her lips. She’d whisper, and the giant man would wilt a little more, perhaps even visibly. He’d take his next three steps and open the door leading to the man and his interview, and he’d be gone.

She’d savor it.

She’d save him for last; there were three others to attend to first.

“Riley Throggle!”

Some of them, like this Throggle, a gangly sweaty man with horrible yellow teeth, would bring the ad with them. They’d enter the room, look around, perhaps notice the way the walls sucked all the color from the room, sucked all the color from everything and everyone but the woman behind the Christine Trumbull placard, and take another peek at the little strip of paper. Some of them, like this Throggle, would squint, and gulp. Would look toward the desk at the front of the room and would begin to speak, Adam’s apple working furiously to keep any actual noise from coming out.

“Is this...am I?” they, like this Throggle, would ask, and Christine would nod.

“You’re here for the interview,” she’d say. “For the job.”

The man at the other end of the room would take another look at the tiny strip of paper in his hands, before shoving it into his pocket and choosing a seat. He’d most likely try to make eye contact with some of the other hopefuls, as had this Riley, and would most likely be completely unsuccessful in the endeavor.

A few of the men had taken their strips of paper directly to her, putting it in front of her green eyes and asking if they were in the right place. Christine had been intensely intrigued by the whole thing the first few times it had happened since all she ever saw was a blank strip of paper; no ink or writing on it at all, nothing there but some torn edges and a few greasy fingerprints.

She often asked the men to read her what they saw on the paper, and the best they could ever do was give her a look as blank as the paper between their fingers. This little game had long since ceased amusing her, and she’d often surprise the hopefuls with her knowledge of their names instead. Only a few, like the tall black man who was still staring at her, would show no reaction to such a simple trick.

She ushered the other two candidates in, confident neither would get the job. Of them, the more suited was a petty thief named Gregor, and she could tell he lacked ambition and will just by glancing at the needle-scarred arms he hung lazily at his sides.

Finally it was just her and the black man, a Robert Beasley, him staring quietly into her eyes, her smiling pleasantly at his occasional snarl. She could feel Gregor’s interview coming to an end, but thought she’d mess with the black man a little more before it was his turn. She smiled some more, wider than she’d ever bothered to try. _How disquieting, he must be thinking. That woman looks insane._ Insane. She giggled inwardly at the thought.

Then the last thing Christine was expecting happened. The man spoke.

“Why do you want it?”

He’d already said it, no clearings of the throat or false beginnings; it was as if he’d already asked the question before his lips had even parted, and the force of it still vibrated throughout the room as he waited for Christine to process his words.

Christine’s smile wilted and her heart beat hot, fire in her blood.

“Want what, Mr. Beasley?” Her voice was tiny compared to his; she blinked and tried again to smile, feeling something she hadn’t felt in so long.

“Why do you want my job? Why do you think you’ve already won, when the thing you feel you’re winning is nothing you can handle?” His voice was like a hammer on heated steel, a forge inside Christine’s head. The smile stayed on, but only out of habit. Inside, she was a roiling mass of nerves. _Don’t answer him, don’t. His business is with the man in the back room, not with you. You don’t answer to him._

“He’ll see you now, Mr. Beasley. Good luck.”

The big black man didn’t move. Instead, he chuckled. “No, Miss Trumbull. Your man’s no longer in. Good old Gregor was his last one for the day. Can’t you tell?” He pointed at the door leading to the back room, and Christine followed his finger. To a blank wall.

The door was no longer there.

_Keep calm, keep calm. You still have the upper hand, you felt his fear before, all this is just a facade. Accept it, and move on. No door, no problem. _

“I suppose you’re right, Mr. Beasley.”

“Call me Bub. And you haven’t answered my question, Miss Trumbull.”

“Call me Christy, Bub. I want the job because I’m more qualified than anyone I’ve put through the door here. I want the job because I deserve the job. It fits me. In my opinion, the boss made a mistake working his blank advertisement on men. Men aren’t strong enough, patient enough, or smart enough for a job like this. I’d have told him that, but I’ve never seen the guy.”

“So you know what the job is, then. You know why the men that go in to interview never step back into this room. You know what the job is, and you still want it.” The black man didn’t seem to believe that what he was suggesting was a possibility. Christine winked at him.

“Bub, I was born for this job.”

Bub Beasley rose to his feet and took three swift steps to Christine’s desk. He extended an oversized hand, meaning for Christine to shake it. She did. Beasley leaned over, putting his mouth near her left ear, and whispered.

“You thought you had me beat, Christy. Because you sensed my fear. It’s best you know now, rather than find out on your own. Fear is essential in a job like this. A fearless ruler is a stupid ruler. And where you’ll be ruling, fear will be your friend. Understand?”

Christine nodded. The black man straightened up again.

“Congratulations, Miss Trumbull. It’s yours. May the position be everything you hoped for and more.” He reached into the collar of his shirt and pulled a chain from his neck. On the chain hung a key. He held it out to her. Christine didn’t move.

“You. You’re him? You’re Satan?”

Bub took hold of one of the woman’s hands and dropped the key in, clasping her fingers around it. He spoke once more, and then he was gone.

“No. You are.”


Twelve Years into the Trump Presidency


# Twelve Years Into the Trump Presidency

I wash my face and ask the wall to turn on the morning address. The music starts and he’s there; a whisp of hair signifying his grand entrance.

“Hey everyone, happy Wednesday! Wednesdays were always one of my favorite days — I think because you’re half over with something that might be bad and you still have half of something left that might be good. Think about that today when you’re hard at work or trying to learn. Also I want to remind everyone — remember when you all hated me and I had to pretend that I was racist to get everyone to vote for me and after I won enough votes I completely changed everything about my campaign because I actually wanted to be a good president? Do you remember that? I know I fooled you once but I haven’t fooled you again since that. I’m your friend now. Aren’t we friends?”

I nod, in case he can see.

“Good. I know you want to trust me, and I think you can trust me. I’m very trustworthy. I want to be able to trust you too. The United States government and—we’re facing a lot of different things from around the world forces and evil. All the time. To keep you safe we have to keep things a little tighter. Things have to be a certain way to maintain your freedom. So if you hear anyone talking about me or plotting against me, that sort of thing, we’re not going to let that sort of thing go on.”

I start putting my folders for work in a shoulder bag. I look around for any kind of energy bar.

“I know some of you are still having some problems with the added terms to the presidency, because it doesn’t look good, it makes it seem like I extended the presidency for myself when of course it was to stabilize America. But let me just explain why I did it and where I’m coming from and why I even got into this in the first place. So as you might know I was a very rich man.”

I sit down. I’m dressed and ready to leave but I can’t until he’s done talking.

“And since gambling was just not very fun I tried to get into politics and donating since you could buy elections back then. At first I was going to do it out of spite because the government is a hard game to win, you know I really wanted Romney in 2012 because Obama I think, Obama had his run. Obama we gave him his term. So at first when I started running for president and it actually was gaining some traction I treated it like it was real when everyone in the media treated it like it was a media stunt or something like that — you guys remember I’m sure. But anyways so I wanted to run for president.”

I have to pee, but I should wait in case he can tell I’m not paying attention. So I sit.

“But then I had this idea of just…just basically putting whoever I wanted into the White House. And it would be this great thing making it so that only one vote mattered and proving that the whole system was broken if someone could hack it so obviously and also you know Mitt Romney would be a damn good president. Well we all know that after I became president I had a change of heart. I decided Mitt Romney was a big loser, especially after he started trying to make me look bad. I know a lot of you liked him, but he’s not around anymore, is he? And of course I had nothing to do with that but people are always saying that about me. Just pick up your phone and dial 911 if you hear anyone saying that about me.”

I nod again.

“Also I thought about what I knew from the Snowden stuff, and all those secrets. I thought, if I just install another politician, what’ll happen? Politics. Politics will happen. And all these secret programs and secret wars and explosions and ISIS and blah blah — only some politician was going to get to know about that stuff. No true American would ever get a look at them. These politicians aren’t American. I’m not even sure they’re human. So instead I decided I’d have to do it myself. And since I knew I couldn’t do it based on the truth, I had to lie.

“I told a little white lie to become president.”

I look at the door. I wait.

“I let people get beat up at my rallies. Sometimes it even looked like I was encouraging it. And that was wrong. And it was wrong of you to think that. But I couldn’t let everything that I’ve built and all of the requests from individuals — I couldn’t let those requests go ignored. And that’s why I began to care so much about the presidency and what it means to the country of America and if we allow the presidency to be impermanent, then we take away from how great America is, where we’d like it to be all the time.

“So when I installed my two Supreme Court justices I made sure they took into account the inflation of time. Because since the founding fathers wrote all of our great America literature, time has gotten a lot more valuable. Or less valuable? Or time passes faster and these days a minute isn’t worth as much of a — anyway I’ll do some research on it. I just hope you have a great Wednesday and be productive and do your part and buy buy buy like those Backstreet kids, they were just terrible, weren’t they? Terrible. Not even a boy band, really.”

His face blurs and he taps the camera. My wall quakes.

“Hey, is this even on?” Music again. Then he’s gone.

I’m late to work and punished for it, but so is everyone else.


Weather or Not


# Weather or Not

On the plane, I look up at the wrong time and he sees my face.

He drops a shoulder into the sluggish passengers ahead of him, those hoisting luggage and those schmoozing with new acquaintances, moving them aside with a grin. Mostly nobody notices but a few, little old women and men who plant themselves in front of the news every night, a few of these recognize him, at least enough to turn to one another and speak. Even here, in Reno.

Weatherman Mark Malone, and if I don’t already know, here he comes to rectify that.

He was watching me when I boarded, and I can always tell. Every time I looked over he flicked his eyes away and pretended to be interested in anything else - his shoelace, a smudge on his finger, the back of a paperback he’d just bought at the Hudson News. Then he would lean forward and  put his head into his hands and smile. His lips moved with self talk, and I can almost hear the words - _she’s mine, she’s mine if I do this right._

The open seating policy on this airline means I could choose whichever seat and so I took the window in the last row. I buckled in and opened SkyMall. A minute or so later is when I look up.

Oh no.

He’s dropping his big butt into the seat beside me (what about the aisle seat I want to know) and he’s all teeth. Then his big hand is doing things above him, manipulating his night bag in the overhead storage bin from the oddest angle. When he breathes it sounds like the seams in his stuffed-animal body are about to tear. He’s talking to himself again, only it’s not to himself anymore I realize, not now that he’s here with me, “Twenty-eight years in the business and they treat me like this,” is not some mantra, it’s an invitation for me to care. It doesn’t work, but guys like Malone don’t give up. He’s a weather man.

”That’s what you get for being the weather man at a major news network,” he says, and now I’m supposed to turn and relax my face, let my jaw go slack to let him know that I’m desperate enough to care about his minor achievements in what a pretty girl like me might consider “show business,” but all I do is turn the page. Hello Slanket for 37.99, you look warm and tacky and here he goes again -

”I tell you,” he says, turning to me, “Don’t ever go into meteorology.”

”I’ll try to avoid it,” I say. And the damage is done. The ice is broken. A big stuffed animal hand makes its way toward my left breast, and I have to intercept it and endure the shake.

”Mark Malone.”

”Hi.”

He raises an eyebrow. I turn back to SkyMall.

”Listen,” he says, groping for a name I haven’t given him. “Listen...would you like to know a secret?”

I really wouldn’t. I’m about to say this - I’ve had enough of Mark Malone already, he was at least odorless on screen - but he doesn’t wait.

”Most weather men. Aren’t built for the job. They’re handsome and they know how to read a teleprompter. There aren’t any real naturals left in the business. Weather men.” He pauses, perhaps for effect, because I’ve got a feeling he’s practiced. “I go outside in the morning and do you know what I see?” He waits again.

”Your newspaper?”

”The future. Not a blue sky or a cloudy one, not wind blowing leaves off trees or frost on grass - I see tomorrow. I’m never wrong. Twenty-eight years and I’ve never been wrong.” I want so badly to goad him, to ask him if the foresight only happens in the mornings, or if he knows where this interaction isn’t going to lead. Instead:

”What did you see this morning?”

He licks his lips and his eyes bulge at the chance to come up with something sensational, something I’ll believe but won’t expect.

”Tornados. More of them than this part of the country has ever seen. Wipe out whole towns. Cities! That’s why I’m on my way out. You’re just lucky to be along for the ride, aren’t you? What are you going out to California for? Acting? A pretty girl like you could do well for herself with the right connections, and believe me, I have connections.”

Milk that undersized sprinkle of glitz and glam - connections.

”Not acting, but it’s an in-front-of-the-camera sort of thing.”

”Oh? What kind? Do I want to know?” He winks at me. Until now I’ve been planning on keeping my mouth shut, but something in me finds a knob and twists it. The knob is Mark Malone.

”I’m actually being moved to San Francisco by Channel 7.”

Malone’s eyes widen. “You’ll be working for - with me, then! Are you a field reporter, or...”

”I’m the new weather man.”

The plane lifts into the air.


Wednesday's Boy

Wheelbarrow Man

You Oort Too Now


# You Oort Too Now

We are one of the first Oort to “step foot” on your planet, “stroll” through your cities. While your attempts at infrastructure are impressive, they also lay bare the limitations of your thought and externalized communication methods. Perhaps you don’t live long enough to approach a measure of potential. This is unfortunate for you, would almost be a shame—if we appreciated the concept of shame. That is what we would call a joke, had we words for it. Oort language is far more internal. We have the feeling of laughter, for instance, however to us many of the aspects of language are unnecessary—but we aren’t trying to make you feel worse than you already do. To share existence with other living creatures is a phenomenon worthy of great respect, regardless of their differences.

We had so far decided against contact—we watch what you do to each other and that’s the only warning we need—except some actions are decided outside of a directive. This is what happened in your case.

In Chicago it is not long before one of you is dead on the street. The light from your closest star has begun to wane, and we experienced you fleeing from another of you, then witnessed your moment of practical termination as you fell, tumbling headfirst in the street. One of you dressed as an officer points a metal tool at one of you in dark clothes, a tool we know is called a gun. The tool and its purpose are death.

The tool’s thunder follows a tearing bite too industrial for flesh, and you are no longer viable in your habitat.

We scuttle up to the officer and come into time, appearing behind him. We wrap our arms and our pincers around him, as it tears into his skin. He struggles, he cries out. We pull him a half second out of time, where he exists in suspended animation. We can return for that one of you and put him back into time but for now he is neutralized out of concern. It is disconcerting to see a willingness in any being to destroy another—we are so rare among the stars. How to reward this blatant disregard for concurrent sentience? We don’t know yet. We may never know. The moment after you murder you is the moment we like you least. We’ll bring you out of time when you’ll learn your lesson.

No others of you are around so we range up to your corpse and poke you in the eye. You don’t move so we open you up to get a look at the works. We need to see for ourselves.

Inside the stretched leather of you a tangle of twisted wet wire makes you up; long meaty ropes that bunch and collect in the groin and the hands and the neck. Once we get our pincers in there we can see you are a machine, that we can pull strings and the machine will dance. We open your skull lengthwise, then we are looking at you, pink and raw and we understand that you are what has been pulling the strings.

A girl child runs up and says “Daddy?”

We feed the child some bliss goo through a proboscis.

We harvest your brain.

We scan you as we harvest, and begin to realize we can do something very special and important for you now. We can keep you alive by sending your channels through ours while feeding you sensory information in a format you expect. We confer quickly among ourselves and decide it will be done.

A few basic connections and we are listening to your desire to reach out to your daughter, to pick her up, to tell her it’s okay.

“Maggie,” you want to say.

We see through your brain how you fear for the way your daughter sees your dead body, because you know how traumatic it can be. Especially because you don’t know what we’ve done to you.

The moment makes us consider coming out of the half-second of time, taking the suit off, so we can communicate with the child we’ve injected with bliss goo, but we don’t do it. We can’t do it.

You become aware of us.

“Who are you?” we hear you think, then, after a moment: “I was jogging home and someone shouted at me to stop, and I turned and I put my hands up. I was shot. Three, four times. Then I fell on my head. I couldn’t breathe.”

The image of it passes through us. The shots pass through us like they did you, in the chest, the groin, the throat. We feel pain, and a deadening.

We want to respond, and there’s a committee of responses of what to say, this first mental contact with an alien species.

We can’t come to a consensus.

Instead we show you how we injected the girl with bliss goo, hoping to allay her fears and suffering from seeing your dead body.

_No, don’t poison her!_

We try to explain about bliss goo, but it is too much like a concept you already have, a concept you hate. Hair win?

_Heroin_

Then you are looking inside us, seeing what we think of you, seeing the long way we considered the situation, the detachment, and you change. You become afraid. You begin to despair.

We are losing our chance.

We feed our vision arrays into your optic nerve, so that you might see like us. More pathways are opened, so that you might smell what we smell, or feel what we feel, think what we think.

Your name is Martin. You speak English.

_Hello,_ we say, stumbling with your language. _We are Oort._

We feed you a calming memory of the Oort hatchery, the easy bliss of waking near our cloudlings: you scream razors into us.

“No, no,” you say. You think of spiders, you think of scorpions.

_Hello,_ we say, _you can be Oort now._

Your body lies dead in front of us, and you can’t look away because we haven’t looked away. Your daughter is misty and unstable, toddling around the street.

We open our control ports to you, to comfort you, and you seize on them and it hurts us dismayingly more than expected.

Then you are running toward your daughter with our body, a half second out of time, and if we had time to explain to you what it means to be out of time, you might not be rushing into the road at this moment.

You try to scoop her up with our pincers but we go right through, because we aren’t there yet, won’t be there for another half second, always. We flash you a vision of your daughter cut to ribbons on our pincers anyway, and that stops you, you understand.

Then you are making us run up and down the road, looking forward, looking backward.

Lights. Vibration.

_Something is coming._

Your daughter is stumbling in the road. You move us toward the oncoming red.

We flash the image of the passing thing going right through us, the way our pincers had harmlessly passed through the child.

_Hello,_ we say, _It will not become aware of us unless:_ We flash the image of a knob on the outside of our suit, and the feeling of how to push it. You don’t hesitate.

You catch us up with time and we materialize in the center of the road; the truck is only dozens of meters away. It swerves out of the way, skids to a standstill, and we go back out of time.

We watch as the driver comes out of his truck cabin, stoops low to pick up the child and holds her close to him. “You are lucky, little girl.” He walks by your body, says “Damn,” and pulls a thing from his side pocket and puts it to his face. We are sure you could explain these things to us but you don’t.

“Yeah, I’ve got one hell of a strange thing. Lawrence and Damen. There’s a dead guy without a brain and a little kid just sitting in the road. And before that…well, never mind. Just, how quickly can you get here?”

We watch, and you watch. When the police come they load the little girl into the backseat, in the ambulance goes the shell of your dead body.

“Let me ride with her,” you say, but we show you that the vehicle will go through us.

And you’re standing there, in the road, waving our pincers as each emergency vehicle passes through us. When they’ve all gone, you relinquish full control of our body to us and retreat into your despair, sobbing silently.

We offer bliss goo and you decline.

“Maggie,” you sob. “Maggie.”

---

This is our report.


Adam Holwerda, Story Peddler

Adam Holwerda,
Story Peddler